Ties That Bind

“Stockholm” and “Dogman.”

- Anthony Lane

The time is 1973, the place is Swe-den, and a man says to a woman, “Did you think about leaving me?” The weird thing is that we are not watching Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” which aired in six spirit draining episodes, on Swedish television, in the spring of that year. Rather, the line comes from “Stockholm,” a new film directed by Robert Budreau, and the man isn’t a husband in distress but a convivial criminal named Kaj Hansson (Ethan Hawke). His name, be warned, is not entirely genuine, and the same goes for his messy mop of hair. The woman he’s asking is Bianca Lind (Noomi Rapace), an employee at a bank in central Stockholm, who has the bad luck to be present when Kaj swaggers in, machine gun at the ready, for a holdup. She becomes his principal hostage, and a pawn in his negotiations with the powers that be. No wonder he doesn’t want to let her go.

Whether Bianca is more than a hostage is a question to which we already know—or think we know—the answer, because it is to this bizarre event, or something like it, that we owe the term Stockholm syndrome. We learn, as the movie begins, that it is “based on an absurd but true story,” and Budreau keeps the bones of that story intact, although he fools around with the flesh— reducing the number of hostages, and stuffing the film with as much Bob Dylan as possible. At one point, a policeman enters the bank and gets shot in the hand by Kaj, who sits him down and orders him to sing along to Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” on the radio. “What kind of cop doesn’t like Dylan? What kind of person doesn’t like Dylan?” Kaj asks. In real life, although a cop was indeed compelled to sing, he was allowed to pick his own tune. He chose Elvis’s “Lonesome Cowboy.” Talk about absurd.