The Fortunate Man

This epic drama pivots on the single Danish word that means both “success” and “happiness.” Every stroke of titular hero Per’s good fortune endangers his happiness. His overweening selfishness is the tragic cost of his escape from his vicar father’s harsh religious austerity. In refusing his father’s demand for humility Per sinks into the opposite mire of arrogance. The strong will that enabled him to flee his father’s faith ultimately defeats his career and love.

While we sympathize with Per’s escape from a stifling religion into the freedom, challenge and responsibility of life as a Copenhagen engineer, we wince at his exploitation of the women he uses on his way up — and down. He shames and abandons the waitress who generously launched his career. He dumps the younger, lighter Salomon girl Nanny for her wealthier and — to be fair — far more substantial older one, Jakobe. He approaches women with the same willfulness he uses on projects: “You want me!” he insists, shorter on sensitivity than on force. 

When his huge engineering project collapses under his own intransigence, however, Per jettisons this great, true love Jakobe as well. He returns to the simplicity of the rural life he’d fled. For this he uses another woman, a vicar’s daughter, who bears him three children before he abandons her for the contentment of a recluse. He persists in a professional vanity that excludes providing for his family. 

Per’s admirable imagination and creativity in engineering posit an alternative to the social well-being that religion promises. He defeats his own project by arrogantly refusing to apologize to the government official upon whose approval the project and its funding depend. At the same time, that stubbornness threatens his relationship with the Salomons. 
     Blinded by his own vanity Per misses Jakobe’s hints that she is carrying his child. When she later launches her school for the poor she confirms that she and their marriage represented Per’s highest potential for the public as well as their private well-being. In their final meeting he reveals he is dying of cancer and bequeathing his meagre fortune to her school — instead of to his abandoned family. Pretending to a new clarity he reveals only another aspect of his blundering selfishness. Even this hermit is vain.

As a father Per catches himself as harsh toward his oldest son as his father was to him. His response is not to soften but to flee. This coheres with his flight from the great passion Jakobe offered. The “fortunate” man proves unable to accept and grow from any of his successes. 

The Salomon family’s Jewishness provides a broadening context to Per’s individual career. The Salomons are a wealthy, successful, highly respected family in the 19th Century Danish community. They raise no concerns when Per is invited into their home, then into their family. They value his intelligence and ideas and are eager to advance his cause.

Indeed the Salomons typify the security of so many Jewish families, integrated into their respective communities, dedicated to advancing their host nations, yet implicitly threatened by the bubbling antisemitism around them. “That Jewish whore,” a government official mutters under his breath when Jakobe comes to try to reconcile with Per’s cold brother. The YWCA rejects Jakobe’s help serving the needy children when they learns she’s Jewish. For all their hard-won good fortune, the Jewish family enjoys a contentment that history will soon disrupt. (Da Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis offers a pertinent parallel here.). In contrast, Per's destruction is completely due to his own arrogance.    
       As for the double meaning of the title: an earlier Danish film Gift meant both poison and marriage.