GREEN BUTCHERS (De Grønne slagtere)By Attic Girl
...or how to convert a complete village to cannibalism !
Svend (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) are assistants of town butcher Holger, an insufferable and brutal boss who’s renowend for his deer sausage. Svend is nervous and insecure. He does not interact well with people, has a ridiculous hairline and is constantly coated with nervous sweat. Bjarne is a troubled pothead who tends to kick people who irritate him. He has a hobby : killing small animals and meticulously assembling their skeletons.
Fed up of being ridiculed and oppressed by Holger they decide to open their own shop. Svend mortgages his house for start-up money and Bjarne orders to pull the plug on his comatose, brain-damaged twin, Eigil, and borrows against his future inheritance. The shop gets off to a disastrous start. No customers on opening day and overnight, Svend accidentally locks their electrician in the meat locker where the poor guy freezes to death. The next morning, when Holger stops by to pick up some meat for his upcomming Rotary Club dinner, desperate Svend chops off one of the corpse’s legs to make ‘chickie-wickies’.
The word of the new meat spreads fast and soon people are lining up at the butcher shop. Svend revels in his newfound popularity and realizes there’s nothing to do except keep it coming. So he transforms into a serial killer with Bjarne as his reluctant but too-apathetic-to-resist accomplice who finds himself butchering up the bodies Sven collects, although he knows it’s crazy.This may sound indigestible but - some of you might be disappointed - there’s no horror and no gore, just a couple of dismemered limbs or bodies in the freezer and some suggestive chopping sounds. The Green Butchers is a comedy, well... a dark comedy. Director Anders Thomas Jensen pulls us into his evil little world, but keeps it human at the same time. He leaves out images of Bjarne butchering the unfortunate victims or the customers eating the chickie-wickies. His characters are peculiar and situations seem really absurd but you end up caring about people who are essentially behaving like psychopaths. Jensen came up as a screenwriter for Lars von Trier’s Dogma 95 group with screenplay credits for ‘Mifune’ and ‘Wildbur wants to kill himself’.
Kaas also plays Bjarne’s comatose twin, Eigil, against whom his brother bears an unspoken grudge. When Bjarne orders to pull his plug the plan backfires, animal-loving vegetarian Eigil awakens from his coma and starts tormenting his brother. Kaas does a brilliant job, you might watch much of this movie before you realize the twins were played by one actor.Now let’s finish with a fine piece of Danish butcher-philosophy I really couldn’t withhold you : ‘It’s almost mythological to kill an animal and then mock it by sticking it in its own intestines. Can you imagine anything worse than being stuck up in your own ass ?’
