“The more soil, concrete or other material you have between yourself and the surface on which radioactive dust may fall, the better the stronghold” reads a passage from the 1961 edition of Om kriget kommer (lit. “In Case of War”), an emblematic pamphlet delivered to Swedish households between 1943 and 1991. The opening credits of John Skoog’s Redoubt, premiering in the New Directors section of the 73rd San Sebastián International Film Festival, depicts this very paragraph and its explanatory illustration, firmly establishing the urgency of Cold War preparedness also in neutral Sweden – to some more than others, as will be demonstrated.

Billed as Skoog’s first fiction feature, Redoubt shares traits with his 2019 feature debut, Ridge [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], a nominal documentary of sparse, eccentric poetry, set in slightly mythical rural surroundings. A tad more classically linear, Redoubt plays out in similar territories, enhanced by artful black-and-white cinematography courtesy of master DoP Ita Zbroniec-Zajt (who also shot Ridge) and a tour-de-force performance by famed Frenchman Denis Lavant, a casting choice as curiously unlikely as it is downright genius.

The main protagonist and nucleus of this real-life account is one Karl-Göran Persson, a most bull-headed stronghold preparer in his day, effectively the 1940s and up until the 1970s. Persson, a lowly farmhand in southernmost Sweden, would spend the greater part of four decades fortifying his house, using any scrap of material he could get his hands on, including motorbike windshields, bedpans, buckets, railway tracks (!) and lots of cement – all in anticipation of that proverbial (?) button-push. His story is all but unknown, completely unlike that of Onoda, the legendary Japanese World War II soldier who spent more or less the exact same period believing the war was still on. Despite their markedly different circumstances and locations, the two very likely inhabit neighbouring islands.

A memorable Laurel & Hardy comedy, Block-Heads, also springs to mind, where Laurel steadfastly soldiers on in a World War I trench for 20 years. As some will know, Denis Lavant is a skilled disciple of pantomime and vintage movie comedy, a contemporary embodiment of yesteryear’s Marceaus, Harpos and Hulots. In Redoubt, Skoog has him playing out just about every scene like it’s a lovingly devised tableau in this tradition. Particularly heart-warming is seeing Karl-Göran dressed in his Sunday best at church service, belting out praise and devotion to physical labour for the love of the Lord. It’s unbending Nordic Lutheranism, pulsating through every fibre of his anatomy. Several light-hearted scenes together with the local youngsters (one of whom also acts as a Greek chorus-like voiceover narrator) imply Karl-Göran’s fundamentally childlike outlook. Grown-ups shake their heads and chuckle at his persistence, but leave the basically likeable fellow alone. Lavant, whose phonetically memorised, accent-tinged Swedish further emphasises Karl-Göran’s offbeat nature, arguably rivals Stéphane Audran in Babette’s Feast when it comes to Gallic-created greatness on Nordic celluloid. It’s a triumphant career highlight.

Karl-Göran Persson’s house still stands, getting scruffier by the day. Military experts have questioned its efficiency as a proper shelter, even back then. As architectural art, it might reside somewhere between Bauhaus and functionalism, and the works of Vilks and Hundertwasser; a singular creation by a – literally – singular creator.

Redoubt is a Swedish-Denmark-Dutch-Polish-Finnish-UK-Swiss co-production staged by Sweden’s Plattform Produktion, with co-production by Film i Väst, Film i Skåne, SVT, BCD Film, Bufo, Lemming Film, Paloma Productions and Madants. Its sales are entrusted to Coproduction Office.