Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Swedish Connection’ on Netflix, a Quirky True Story of a Bureaucrat Who Helped Free Jews From the Nazis’ Clutches
Where to Stream:
The Swedish Connection
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The Swedish Connection (now on Netflix) is the nebbish-to-mensch story of Gosta Engzell, a Swedish bureaucrat who facilitated the rescue of 100,000 Jews from the genocidal clutches of Nazis. His status as an unsung hero justifies this Therese Ahlbeck and Marcus Olsson-written-and-directed biopic, which can reasonably be filed under Untold Stories of World War II, a similarly unsung movie subgenre. Now let’s see if the film does justice to its righteous subject matter.
The Gist: STOCKHOLM, 1942. How paranoid were the Swedes of a Nazi takeover? Paranoid enough that the sighting of one single wayward German ship incites panic. It makes sense – Sweden’s grip on wartime neutrality was of the type that rendered them a soft ally of the Nazis, allowing troop transport and providing resources for the evil regime. And if we learned anything by watching Narvik, which depicted the invasion of neutral Norway, it’s that the Nazis weren’t particularly respectful of Scandinavian neutrality. Imagine that. Unscrupulous Nazis. It boggles the mind.
Anyway, the truth of the Holocaust was only a rumor at this point, but clues began to emerge in the form of visa requests from Jewish residents, piling up to the ceiling in the legal department of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It’s a crummy basement office, cramped and situated beneath sewage pipes that grumble like a musk ox with intestinal distress. The entire Ministry is a place where bucks get passed around and around until absolutely nothing gets accomplished, and Berlin prefers it that way. One of these paper-pushers is Gosta Engzell (Henrik Dorsin), a milquetoaster who’s perfectly fine with ignoring the visa applications under the urgings of the censor who makes sure the newspapers don’t say anything bad about Hitler or his crew of shitbirds, and his boss, Soderstrom (Jonas Karlsson), who dismisses the Final Solution intel as “rumors” that are yet to be confirmed by German officials – please scoff loudly here – and doesn’t seem to think too highly of Jewish people in the first place. Nice Ministry you’ve got here, Sweden.
It takes hiring Rut Vogl (Sissela Benn) as Gosta’s assistant for anyone’s conscience to be introduced to the waking world. He’s about to have all the requests archived – read: shoved in a place that’s even worse than this office – when Rut flags a case in which two Norwegian Jewish boys are in a transitory camp on their way to one of the camps with the ovens, separated from their mother and Swedish stepfather, whose citizenship should be enough cause to reunite them on neutral ground. That’s the “Swedish connection.” Gosta gets halfway through a shrug when Rut takes him and the other lawyers to task: “This isn’t just paper – it’s people,” she pleads.
And so the seed of Gosta’s spine is planted. He decides to cease his complacent do-nothingism and combat tyranny with the tool he knows best: bureaucracy. The film isn’t big on the details of affidavits and letters of intent and declarations, but it’s still detailed enough that I’d rather sum it up succinctly: Gosta throws paperwork at everyone, he and his team finding loopholes that allow passports to be stamped and Jewish people from Norway and Denmark to find safe haven in Sweden. This is the story of a small handful of normal folk, combatting the most vile ideology in modern history.
Photo: Netflix
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? By keeping the tone light (for better or worse) and confining the drama and “action” to offices and boardrooms, The Swedish Connection is a lighterweight version of Schindler’s List – a movie quite clearly invoked when Gosta declares, “If we can save one person by simply doing our job, then by God, we should try.” And for another unheralded Scandinavian WWII story, check out the aforementioned Narvik, about the Nazi invasion of Norway.
Performance Worth Watching: Dorsin is a comedian of prominence in Sweden, a likely parallel to versatile American stars like Steve Carell or Bob Odenkirk. The Swedish Connection isn’t a film of heavy-duty performances, but he capably anchors the tricky tone by doling out levity and sobriety at the appropriate time.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: How precious are you about tone? The Swedish Connection navigates potentially treacherous waters by injecting comedy into a real-life story set during a bleak portion of history. With its humorous cutaways and depictions of ineffective Swedes – and the occasional hapless Nazi – the film doles out an ever-so-slightly off-putting amount of quirk, but it ultimately doesn’t torpedo the endeavor. Some may take issue with the lack of gravity applied to the more serious, life-or-death dramatic developments, but Olsson and Ahlbeck’s intent is conveyed in the song that plays over the end credits: “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” And so the movie does just enough to acknowledge tragedy on its way to emphasizing the uplift of an ordinary guy doing what he can to save lives – a rather significant number of them, even.
Is it funny that Gosta, if he continues to manipulate the system as he does, is threatened by his superiors to be shipped to Stalin’s Moscow, where Swedish diplomats are “asked” to drink vodka that might not be just vodka? It’s definitely dark comedy, and an effective way to raise the stakes for the protagonist even though it’s frequently implied to those of us unfamiliar with this slice of history that our guy is going to be OK. (The punchline to this particular bit is predictable and likely fiction, but satisfying nonetheless.) This is the story of a war-within-a-war being fought with forms and filings instead of bombs and bullets.
And so the directors’ intent seems to be to spotlight an unlikely hero and point of Swedish pride, using a distance of 80 years as an excuse to soften the tone and theoretically draw in viewers who aren’t up for a muscular, intense drama. That may not work for everyone, and that’s understandable – it’s damn difficult to eke out a laugh within 1,000 years of a genocide. But to watch Gosta perform self-described “bureaucratic pirouettes” in the name of what’s just and right is modestly inspiring. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: One person doing the right things can change things for the better.
Our Call: Gosta Engzell may not have the fame of Oskar Schindler, but his story is still worth telling. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
