User Reviews

Egon is a farmer with a few milk-cows. He has always had the milk picked up from his table by the road-side. One day the dairy company and the road-authorities decide that he, and every other farmer shall deliver the milk-cans to a common table quite a way from Egon's farm. He refuses to obey and keeps his table by the road-side. Every time the snow-plow passes by his table, the driver makes shure he demolishes Egon's table. But Egon builds a new table. The next day the snow-plow smashes that one as well. Egon builds another. It gets smashed. Who will win this "mid-winter duel"? Lars Molin has always honored the little man. He could be a farmer, a factory-worker, even an alcoholic. This film is no different. It's a lot of fun watching the farmer coming up with new ideas as how to overcome the authorities. Why is Egon so stubborn? Well, first of all; Nobody asked him. And second; If you bend for decisions made by others in a small matter, what will happen next? Today we have the answer to the last question. The little dairy-farmer is now extinct. Now the dairy-companies only gets their milk by the tons from gigantic farms with thousands of milk cows. Lars Molin saw it happen way back in 1983.

This sounds very serious, and it is. Underneath. Lars Molin always used humor and whit, combined with social comment. Only when it's over you realize that this wasn't just a farce or a comedy. If you get a chance to see it, you will laugh all the way through it and then you start thinking...

A middle-aged dairy farmer and his wife are increasingly embittered and challenged in their confrontation with what they consider the Road Administration's tyrannical and capricious actions. In brief, the local snow plow driver, on each early morning run, takes truculent glee in destroying their one roadside milk stand after the other. Since time immemorial local dairymen have set their milk tins for pickup on roadside stands, symbols of each family's pride - but now, our heroes reconstruct a new stand each day - to replace the destruction - each stand more diabolically conceived than the last, in their efforts to defy the Administration. All other farmers threw in the towel at the Administration's first announcement, but not our heroes.

So - we see the man lying tucked in bed beside his wife, in the cold of one winter night after another, his eyes wide open, scheming revenge, scheming the perfectly indestructible milk stand... And like the main character, I, too, found myself dreaming up one scheme after another, as though somehow I could fight my way through the wind and drifting snow to his barn, find the tools, and work all night to 'get back at' that darned snow plow.

A quick film with wonderfully accessible and slightly wacky humor - presenting problems that any supervisor of people, any schemer, any person who's ever been outraged at the arrogance of public officials will find sympathy with. Full of delicate sympathy, wry smiles at human frailty, and leading to final redemption.

This is a film of the ilk Magnus Mills might have devised - you (we)supervisors of the world may know his book entitled "The Restraint of Beasts", about fence builders running amok across Scotland. Talk about hilarity...