PELLE THE CONQUEROR
Immigrant sagas are surefire cinematic material, or at least they ought to be. Immigrants are ordinary people cast into extraordinary circumstances, being forced to cope with a confounding and often unfriendly milieu, whether the case at hand happens to involve Guatemalans in Los Angeles (El norte), Italians in Switzerland (Bread and Chocolate), Moroccans in Munich (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), or Sicilians (The Godfather, Part II) or Jews (Hester Street) or anyone else you might care to name–including extraterrestrials–in New York. The reasons people, haplessly or hopefully, settle in foreign climes are stories in themselves, and, if well told on-screen, link characters (and audiences) to a welter of remote but powerful influences. Did the protagonists flee famine, death squads, or debt collectors? Were the characters simply enticed by the scent of money and adventure? What awaits them? Perhaps a Lower East Side tenement, a refugee camp, or a wilderness to tame.
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Whatever the setting, immigrant tales can capture those peculiarly crucial moments when people are at both their weakest and their boldest, when they’re most vulnerable and enterprising, and when they have little to lose and even less with which to fight. In the startling alien terrain newcomers plunge into point-blank confrontation with their own values, and can draw fresh (if wavering) lines between abject submission and pragmatic adjustment to the locality. In short, they redefine themselves, their identities, for better or worse. Of course, immigration poses a severe test for proclaimed national values as well: there are limits to the tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free who will do so legally.
The illiterate father feeds the boy’s dreams of “conquering” the world, and in the meantime encourages education. One day while inexpertly herding cattle Pelle meets Rud, a scrawny outcast boy, who swaps badly needed cowherding tips for a meal. Rather fleetingly, Pelle also strikes up acquaintances with the mild-tempered but defiant indentured worker Erik, Mrs. Kongstrup, a lonely childless woman prone to Gothic wailing within her huge house, and Anna (Kristina Tornqvists), a young woman in love with a man “above her station.” Curiously, Pelle displays very little warmth. Then an avalanche of implausibilities begins.
Beneath the transparent, by-the-numbers schema there are potent elements at play in this work, but unfortunately they go unexplored. The script chooses not to probe the painful core of the boy’s soul. Instead it looks like an art film, sounds like an art film, moves like an art film, and has reaped an art film’s reward.
