When a baroness summons a young poet to her estate and suggests they make a deal, he should have hightailed it back down the road.
Is there no equivalent to the phrase “If it looks too good to be true, it is” in Danish? Because when a baroness in “The Pact” summons a young poet to her estate north of Copenhagen and suggests they make a bargain, he should have hightailed it back down the road to his modest home, his kind wife and their towheaded toddler. But he doesn’t.
Even when Baroness Karen Blixen (Birthe Neumann) — best known as the author of “Out of Africa,” and under her pen name, Isak Dinesen — warns the young poet Thorkild Bjornvig (Simon Bennebjerg) to run if she exhibits any bouts of megalomania, he doesn’t take the hint. The poet wants the greatness the famous author guarantees him if he puts absolute trust in her.
An award winner in Denmark, this well-acted drama about the price of literary ambition is directed by Bille August and based on Bjornvig’s 1974 memoir, which was later translated into English as “The Pact: My Friendship With Isak Dinesen.” At the start of the friendship, the baroness has been out of Africa more than 15 years, though the family manor, Rungstedlund, has plenty of artifacts from her time in Kenya.
Neumann’s baroness is grandiose and transfixing (as are Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen’s handsome costumes). Nanna Skaarup Voss as Grete Bjornvig and Asta Kamma August as Benedicte Jensen, Thorkild Bjornvig’s possible love interest, offer soft counterpoints to Blixen’s patrician aura. Yet there’s a cloying whiff of the unreliable protagonist here: Thorkild Bjornvig is too often accidentally a louse. It is a nice touch that the person with the most sympathy for this Faustian she-devil turns out not to be the poet.
The Pact
Not rated. In Danish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
