The Pact

I have been revisiting a few films by the Danish director Bille August. Twist and Shout was a favorite of mine as a teenager. I found it very romantic at the time, although the love story in it descends into tragedy. Suffice it to say that some visceral scenes from the film have come back to me over the last week, since the more harrowing aspects of Britney Spears’ memoir have been in the news.

This week I watched August’s The Pact for the first time, and was struck by some of the visual similarities and emotional echoes of his earlier work. There is a similar love triangle in the two films, featuring a proper and long-lasting relationship that feels like work and an improper, short-lived relationship that feels like freedom. There is even a shadow fourth player outside the triangle in both, acting as catalyst or foil for the hero. Both also involve a mother with mental health problems who is being manipulated by someone else. August appears to be drawn to certain themes, which he has studied and presented in different ways over his career.

Twist and Shout is based on a book by August’s co-writer, the Danish young adult novelist Bjarne Reuter. The Pact is based on a memoir by Thorkild Bjørnvig, about his friendship with the famous Danish writer, Isak Dinesen—the pen name for Karen Blixen. Bjørnvig met Blixen when he was a young aspiring poet and she, thirty years his senior, was an established success. The pact in question is one young people often make with mentors—they provide adoration and the invigorating breeze of youth, while the mentor provides support and guidance and a form of protection. At least, this is the sort of pact Bjørnvig imagines he is entering; in reality, the arrangement goes along different lines. Blixen talks about her pact with the devil to become a famous writer, and by the end of the mentorship, Bjørnvig comes to see that he has bound himself to a similarly diabolical figure.

Bjørnvig always addresses Blixen as “Baroness,” and she always refers to him as “Magister,” a mischievous—and condescending?—way of calling him a scholar. The titles signal a deceptive formality and distance between the two, as though they are acting out roles with each other, or, as Blixen herself puts it, wearing masks. From the beginning, Blixen makes needling remarks intended to steer Bjørnvig to her will, hitting his vulnerable point—his desire to be a true artist—over and over in order to make him take increasingly reckless actions that destroy his old life and fold him ever more closely into hers. He is married and has a small child when they meet, but when he has a fall she insists that he convalesce at her estate for a full month, away from his family. For his part, he can’t help but notice that it is much easier to write when you don’t have a toddler in the next room babbling away. The Baroness tells him he is petit bourgeois, predictable, surrounded by mediocrity, and that the word “wife” rarely appears in poetry by the true masters—she insists he must transcend these limitations and, presumably, leave his family to fend for themselves while he seeks greatness. In addition to demanding that he stay at her house for long stretches, she encourages him to leave the country for months at a time and devote himself to learning and craft at a German university, going as far as to encourage his infatuation with another woman who visits him there.

I would say that Birthe Neumann’s performance as Blixen is over the top, or that her many openly aggressive and cutting remarks come off as far-fetched, except that they clearly are not. It is only the reversed gender roles of this kind of pairing—otherwise extremely common and, if anything, worse in its typical form—that highlights how cursed your average sexualized mentorship can be. I thought the horror of it would be shown rather than explained, but Bjørnvig’s ill-treated wife eventually comes to read Blixen exceedingly well and shares her interpretations of the situation. Her knowledge comes a bit too late, of course, but she finds an immensely useful moral in her predicament. It is your job in life, she decides, to try to limit the accumulated pain you have experienced to yourself, and not inflict it on others. Blixen is not self-aware or mature enough to do this, and lashes out instead, making other people’s lives a misery. People with power can unleash their trauma on the wider world.

The abuse of power is a theme in Twist and Shout, too. The story follows two friends. While one is off having love affairs and playing a Beatles-theme band, the other is locked in a domestic horror story, with a controlling father and a gaslit, traumatized mother. As a teenager, I was so struck by the dark part of the tale, and the way it highlighted the carefree normality of the luckier friend’s life. The two boys come together and more or less equalize in the end, as one escapes his horrible father and the other crashes down from the heights of his first great love. In The Pact, we mostly inhabit the darker world, where the ruin of one person’s life leaks outwards, potentially contaminating everything. But even in that world, you can still wield truth and insight to counter the darkness, and get away.