User Reviews

This was a decent movie but slow in places and honestly it made me sad. Nobody really ended up happy. Just a dreary movie. Wish it had played out differently.

The attempt to portray the extremely many-facetted story of Lykke Per isn't a poor one. August knows what buttons to press and how to depict emotional relationships however complicated they may seem. The start and the first half of the story works surprisingly well, although, it's not with much force and some surprises how characters evolve and make decisions. Of course it's an impossiple task to portray people's inner struggles on film with the kind of details that author Henrik Pontoppidan did in his majestic novel. The transformation from book to cinema has always led to comparisons, which doesn't help any of the artists involved. And it will always be the director's choice to focus on what he/she feels is best for the film, however, intentions and reasons should be plausible and make sense, and I often felt a lack of logic while watching the many shifts in the second half of the tv-series. It's understandable how Jakobe and Per are brought together in the end - a major conflict with the novel, as the film has to tell the story in limited time, but when the protagonist is transformed into something as simple as an opportunist, who is willing to take a chance with everyone available. The sacrifice is crucial to the message of the novel and its complex narration. Likewise, Esben Smed's portrait of Per is simplified and with a lack of reason, whereas Katrine Greis-Rosenthal as Jakobe is the series' far best manifested character.

Film director August may have had limited reels of film to get to the end of Per's many turns and, if not impossible, it becomes quite hard to come to terms with his change of ideas and moods along the way. When he marries Inger and a decade has passed, I wonder how many people understand the process behind his decision at hand, and when Per is translocated to self-isolation in the desolate wild at the end, you cannot but ask yourself how in anyone's name did he end up there? The true struggles and what motivated him to leave Inger and the children behind simply blows in the air. As a character, Per is left to us as someone with not only existential problems but also mental issues, which is a sad and difficult pill to swallow.

The story - the great novel is there for us, so why not use its true strengths instead of just making a mediocre portrait of human conditions and class struggles? This could have been a major tv-series that would have set new standards in character portrayal if only the team behind the series had taken the novel more serious. We could have had a series in 12 acts that would leave us with a meaningful work of art - now we are left with mainstream entertainment that noone remembers in a year.