The Green Butchers is a comedy that combines the trite, the morbid and the amusing. Bjarne and Svend are pals. Svend has great ambition driven by an equally great inferiority complex, while Bjarne hardly cares about anything else at all apart from Astrid, his girlfriend. Starting their own butcher shop enables them to escape from their vicious boss, Holger, but the shop doesn’t do well until a bizarre coincidence leads Svend to concoct a new dish for their organic butcher shop. Business takes off, but will they still be able to obtain the ingredients for this special dish?
Successful Danish screenwriter and film-maker, Anders Thomas Jensen, has written screenplays for most of the Danish movie blockbusters from the end of the 90’s onwards. Most recently he wrote the screenplay for action-comedy At World’s End, directed by Tomas Villum Jensen, and The New Tenants which won an Oscar for the Best Short Live Action Film at the Academy Awards in 2010.
Anders was one of three writers on historical biopic The Duchess (2008) starring Keira Knightley. He co-wrote Brothers (2009) starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman and Tobey McGuire and penned the screenplay for popular Danish drama After The Wedding. Other writing credits include Mifune’s Last Song, In China They Eat Dogs, the Dogme film The King is Alive, Open Hearts, Stealing Rembrandt among many others.
Jensen won his first Oscar for his comedy short Election Night in 1998 which he co-directed with Tomas Villum… read more
I'm not sure if it's this really dark humour I don't quite undersand or if the story was, in fact, at times more disturbing than funny. Really enjoyed it at the start, but the further the plot unraveled, the stranger and unfunnier things got. Nevertheless, some fantastic performances - always a pleasure to see Mikkelsen and Lie Kass in the same film.
This is often very funny (the fat butcher's musing on the sausage is a highlight) but ultimately a little disturbing, not because of the black humour, but because it's played so straight you wonder if you've wandered into a drama. Great art direction.
NLK is superb, and so is Blenkov's photography. The films gives much to chew on, though don't expect a towardly aftertaste
