22nd of JulyPosted by Hsu Bengtsen on August 2nd, 2021 GoMovies Erik Poppe's “Utøya July 22”, in which the Norwegian director drilled through the massacre in a youth camp on an island near Oslo on July 22, 2011 in real time, was only shown in German cinemas in September. Now Netflix is following up with its own production of the devastating terrorist attack, which celebrated its world premiere in the competition at the Venice Film Festival: Director Paul Greengrass is now primarily famous for his outstanding "Bourne" blockbusters, but he has become known with films like "Bloody Sunday" or "Flug 93", in which he tries to recreate tragic events with the greatest possible degree of authenticity. With “22. July ”he now goes one step further. It not only shows the attack on the holiday camp, in which 69 people were murdered, but also the consequences of the crime, including the trial of the perpetrator and the survivors' attempts to regain a minimum of normalcy. This narrative breadth has the consequence that “22. July ”never reached the intensity of“ Flug 93 ”and“ Bloody Sunday ”, but with his multi-layered approach he suggests the far-reaching traumatic consequences of the attack - not only for the victims and their relatives, but for one of them whole nation.
July 22nd Trailer DF
Oslo, July 21, 2011: While Anders Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie) is making the final preparations for his perfidious attack plan, the youngsters arrive on the island of Utøya, where they want to spend the summer in a summer camp run by the Social Democratic Party. Among them are Viljar (Jonas Strand Gravli) and his little brother. Early the next morning, Breivik detonates a bomb in the political district of Oslo and then drives to Utøya, where he murdered 69 mostly young people. Viljar survives seriously injured and only slowly finds his way back to life in the months after the crime, while Breivik waits in prison for his trial, which he wants to use as a big stage to further spread his anti-Islamic message ...
Actually one would have expected a film like “Utøya July 22” from Paul Greengrass, a hyperkinetic re-enactment of the assassination, which is always very close to the victims with a shaky hand camera. With such an aesthetic authenticity approach, he finally re-enacted the events on board one of the hijacked planes on September 11 in “Flight 93” - and his “Bourne” films also thrive on such rousing, close-up scenes. In “22. However, there are hardly any such moments in July. The attack itself is described in a few minutes, after half an hour Breivik is arrested and Norway's liberal self-image is shaken. The focus of Greengrass ‘Film is clearly on the after. A clear break with the previous narrative patterns of the British director, who nevertheless takes meticulous care not to bring his own interpretations or psychologizations into the action.
The time told in “22. July “covers a good year, from the assassination attempt to the pronouncement of the verdict in the trial of Breivik, who was sentenced in August 2012 to life imprisonment. Apparently unmoved, Breivik, as embodied by Anders Danielsen Lies, takes note of this judgment, unshaken in his belief that with his attack he has set a sign against the increasing foreign infiltration of Norwegian society in his eyes. Obvious references to many other nations, currents and parties can be seen here; Breivik's rhetoric almost inevitably makes you think of all the populists in Western countries, who have gained more and more impetus in recent years.
That is the crucial difference between the two Utøya films: While Poppe's “Utøya July 22nd” only shows and is decidedly beyond any analysis, Greengrass tries with the broad arc that he in “22. July ”suggests working out and understanding the causes and consequences of the attack. The biggest challenge is of course not to give Breivik and his ideology a platform. To be understood, but not to be trivialized or even justified. You can tell in the film what a delicate, fine line that is, when it often moves overly cautiously through events and deliberately spends a lot of time with the victims, even if this is less dramatic at this point. It is thanks to the impressive presence of debutant Jonas Strand Gravli in the role of survivor Viljar that the juxtaposition of perpetrator and victim succeeds, one having to deal with imaginary and the other with actual injustice. This is much more didactic and less close than with other Greengrass films. But there is a lot
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