Given Stephen King’s Cujo – which is the tale of a St. Bernard dog that becomes rabid – and the fact that this is an entry in this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, this writer was half-expecting St. Bernard Syndicate to be an excessively bloody story of a group of gangsters who breed killer St. Bernards, who terrorise Little Italy. Cue Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro as a group of underground cops trying to bring down the gang with lots of profanity and Goodfellas-style torture.
OK, well, it’s a thought – and one suspects that Martin Scorsese probably does have a cast-off in his vault along those lines – but this Danish entry is nothing of the kind and will definitely throw people off expecting a film like the one described above.
Rather, St. Bernard Syndicate is a bittersweet tale of two ne’er-do-well individuals, Rasmus and Frederik. Rasmus (Rasmus Bruun) has just been diagnosed with ALS (Muscular Dystrophy), the same condition that affected the late Stephen Hawking, whilst Frederik (Frederik Cilius Jørgensen) is an ambitious but unsuccessful entrepreneur. When they bump into each other at a school reunion, Frederik persuades Rasmus to invest in his latest wild idea of selling St. Bernards to the apparently-thriving Chinese market, against the wishes of his unsupportive father who happens to own one by the name of Dollar.
With Dollar in tow, stolen by Frederick for business and show, their odyssey takes them to Shanghai, where the problems begin with a series of misadventures and misunderstandings that leave them teetering on the brink constantly, but the underdog spirit of both our heroes (and the audience) hopes that good will become of their goal…
De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival has certainly embraced the film this year, given that it has won awards for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. Director Mads Brugger has already shown a knack for this type of material with his previous documentary works Red Chapel and The Ambassador. St. Bernard Syndicate is his debut scripted feature and in terms of manner and style. It is very much in the realm of Borat and The Office, though not as extreme or funny as those examples.
Bruun and Jorgensen, who seem to be playing their namesakes, are excellent and capture the discomfort of people who are out of their league and strangers in a strange land in a classic culture-clash tale of woe. There are some great exteriors of the Shanghai city and there is a real tragic air to the story, given the revelation at the outset that Rasmus has been diagnosed with ALS.
St. Bernard Syndicate is an adequate film for what it is, but it is still a surprise that it emerged as an entry in a festival that seems to deal with more specialist genre offerings, given that it would be more suited to mainstream festivals like Berlin, London and Toronto.
ST. BERNARD SYNDICATE / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: MADS BRÜGGER / SCREENPLAY: LÆRKE SANDERHOFF / STARRING: RASMUS BRUUN, FREDERIK CILIUS JØRGENSEN / RELEASE DATE: TBC
