Anti-fascist cinema: Nr. 24 (2024)
"Nonviolence is lovely, but it doesn't work when your country has been taken by people who despise humanity."
Nr. 24 (2024)
Directed by John Andreas Andersen
Streamable on Netflix
The word “resistance” is tossed around a little bit lightly. Perhaps spurred by movies like “Star Wars,” the resistance connotes a swashbuckling group of fighters, usually led (in movies) by a cool, handsome guy whose makeup, hair and costume are meant to show audiences that he was a rebel even before he joined the rebels. This pirate type leads a “ragtag band of outsiders” in performing cinematic derring-do marked with explosions and a few tossed-off lines of sardonic dialogue. One thinks of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” where in one of his incarnations the title character exhibits a devil-may-care attitude:
War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood, and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. ''The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" … Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?"
It’s bracing, then, to get a more serious account of a real resistance fighter and his deeds during a very real occupation. “Nr. 24” (“Number 24,” the code name of the film’s central figure) is set during the Nazi occupation of Norway from 1940-45. Small countries like Norway don’t usually get much attention for their role in World War II, and the nation doesn’t get the Hollywood treatment here, as “Nr. 24” is an entirely Norwegian production from head to toe. Its focus is a historical figure named Gunnar Sønsteby, leader of a group of Norwegian resistance righters during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945.
The film’s framing device is a lecture delivered by an aged and infirm Sønsteby to the students and teachers of an elementary school. He regales them with an account of what it was really like to resist an occupying army that would stop at nothing to enforce its rule. Some of his team’s exploits were cinematic, certainly; but many members of his group were captured, and tortured to get them to betray the others.
The film provides the requisite action scenes illustrating the work of the resistance; indeed, these scenes, in which a younger Sønsteby is portrayed by Sjur Vatne Brean, dominate the film. Action sequences are very ably done, while the stereotype of the glamorous resistance leader is intentionally somewhat undermined both by the figure of Brean, whose face is skinny and long and not very handsome, and by the actor’s depiction of Sønsteby as a modest and quiet person.
But while the WWII scenes make up most of the movie, those that are set in the present day as a 90-ish Sønsteby speaks to children about both the action of the resistance and the moral issues that he had to contend with, is the part that stayed with me.
The elder Sønsteby, as portrayed by Erik Hivju, is both determined to speak the truth and clearly feels he has nothing to prove; in this, he matches the modesty and directness of his younger self. But more than that, he also calls upon the fresh-faced schoolchildren to put themselves in his position, asking them to imagine how they might behave if Norway were once again to be taken over by an occupying army.1 It’s obviously impossible for them to imagine such a thing, but he keeps at it, asking them to consider the risks, not just that direct action might pose to themselves, but to their families — as a scene from the war shows Sønsteby’s father being arrested and driven away by the state police force.
In a twist, one of the students, an extremely earnest girl who looks to be 11 or 12, asks the aged resistance fighter if his group ever killed any Norwegians. Yes, he replies, collaborators who were responsible for the persecution of Norwegian Jews, for example. Not accepting this answer, the girl asks whether killing the traitors was really necessary. At first Sønsteby is dumbfounded, giving the girl a chance to follow up. For example, she says, did you ever consider non-violence? Now Sønsteby is on more familiar ground; he’s been asked this before, perhaps. “Nonviolence is lovely,” he says, “but it doesn't work when your country has been taken by people who despise humanity.”
One expects the movie to leave it at that. But the girl presses on, getting to the point. She explains that she’s inquiring because family lore says that toward the close of the war one of her relatives was shot by the resistance. She gives the man’s name; Sønsteby’s face darkens. It’s the name of his boyhood friend, who (as scenes from the war then show) threatened to betray Sønsteby and his operation to the Nazis. To prevent this, Sønsteby had him apprehended and shot.
Following the depiction of this act, the film returns to the school auditorium. No, Sønsteby says to the girl. That name doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry about your relative, but the end of the war meant that a lot of scores were settled. All I can say is I don’t know.
Not only do we forgive the lie, but it’s probably better for the kid not to know that her grand uncle, or whoever he was to her, was a Nazi snitch.
“Nr. 24,” as do all historical movies, mixes historical facts with just enough fiction to clarify the facts. The acts or characteristics of real people might be combined to make a hybrid character who represents all of them. Or things that happened at two or three different places are depicted as taking place all in the same day to make the story tighter and more dramatic — to make a better movie. I can’t be certain that happened here, because only a Norwegian would be familiar enough with this history to know the difference. I will say that “Nr. 24” is both an effective and encouraging movie about an armed resistance movement that actually existed.
What the movie misses out on showing is how petty but collective acts of sabotage can be effective. There’s a scene in the film where Sønsteby is tasked with blowing up an employment office because the Germans are going to dupe unemployed men to sign up to perform slave labor in Germany. Though the building is supposed to be empty at night, Sønsteby’s demolition crew arrives to find it buzzing. Going into the offices, they enquire as to why several dozen workers are busy at their desks. “We had a sudden project from the officials,” a supervisor explains, “so we’re working all night to get ready.”
Fy fæn! Hasn’t anyone told them about sabotage? As the CIA’s own sabotage manual advises, office workers can resist an occupying power on a daily basis is simply by working badly:
Multiply paperwork in plausible ways. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved In issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do. Apply all regulations to the last letter.
Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses. Misfile essential documents.
Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job. Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can…
If these employment office workers had just done a collective slowdown, Sønsteby wouldn’t have had to blow the place up. And not only would a slowdown or work stoppage have been effective, it would satisfy the student’s suggestion that resistance can be nonviolent.
We’re all going to have to bone up on these concepts in the weeks and months to come. You really should read that CIA thing.
For another example, here’s another historical event that could serve as a guide. Well, it’s from 2023, but then again, that seems like a very long time ago. And the reason for this action was probably not intentional sabotage. At least, I don’t think so:
Again: this was not intentional sabotage. Not at all.