Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen)

Director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen in Oslo with Helene Bergsholm

TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! (Få meg på, for faen)            B+                  

Norway  (76 mi)  2011  d:  Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

While the film title reflects a whimsical, almost comic book style silliness, where there’s not likely to be anything to take seriously, this is instead a hilarious, surprisingly complex and insightful youth film, told from the point of view of one 15-year old Norwegian girl, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), who is smart and sarcastic as hell.  Just the opening segue introducing her tiny Norwegian town in the mountains as a place of empty roads and sheep, where absolutely nothing ever happens, where the girls her age give the village sign the finger every time they enter town, which is in stark contrast to the majestic mountainside forests with a pristine lake down below set in the rugged fjords of the region.  In fact, it looks like a perfect vacation destination, but every kid loathes the town they get stuck in.  Alma hangs out with two sisters, Ingrid (Beate Støfring), a buxom Scandinavian Brünnhilde with a love for lip gloss and Saralou (Malin Bjørhovde), an edgier outcast with a social conscience closer to Thora Birch’s Enid from GHOST WORLD (2001).  Alma, herself a blond beauty, pokes fun of the world around her while continually imagining herself in the throes of some wild sexual experience, where unlike many teen movies she isn’t having lots of sex, she’s dreaming of having lots of sex, keeping her so confused her fantasy and reality worlds are interchangeable, keeping the viewer off balance as well where they can’t tell the difference.  Her alternate world is sexy and hilarious and certainly keeps her upbeat and happy.  The problem is having to return to reality and bear the same monotonous doldrums all over again.

Based on a novel by Olaug Nilssen, about a girl in a small place with very active hormones, the story could be anyone and is not unique to Alma, but the director wraps this film around Alma’s snappy wit and personal charm, making this something of a Scandinavian delight constantly poking fun at itself, a film that would never be made in the United States, as the uninhibited sex scenes are scandalous showing teenagers actually enjoying themselves—how novel an idea.  For instance, in the opening scene, Alma gets down and dirty on her kitchen floor, fingering herself while listening to Stigge, an overfriendly phone sex operator from “Wet and Wild Dreams.”  But the real object of Alma’s desires is Artur (Matias Myren), a cute kid living nearby that she sees at school and also occasionally while walking her dog, but she envisions him climbing through her window at night crawling into bed with her and spending the night in each other’s arms.  Instead she meets him at a dance at the local youth center, which is basically a gymnasium without basketball nets and old beat up sofas sitting outside.  While Alma is standing outside sipping a beer, Artur walks up and exposes himself, actually poking her thigh with his erection, where it’s impossible to know whether this is real or imagined.  However venomous rumors rapidly spread throughout the school and Alma is immediately shunned and ostracized, even by her own friends, becoming the least popular kid in class, where graffiti on the bathroom walls label her “Dick-Alma.”

This is like every 15-year old’s worst nightmare, expressed in a laceratingly dark comic style that also contains a touch of poignancy, as despite the fact her fantasies do resemble the sexually hyper-exaggerated world of musicals, she is completely devastated by the turn of events.  Making matters worse, her mom finds out about her phone sex bills and blabs about it to everyone she knows all over town.  This is the true portrait of small towns where everyone knows everybody else’s business, where you can’t do a thing without the whole world knowing about it.  In panic, Alma runs away to Oslo to visit Saralou’s older sister Marie in college, hoping she can offer some perspective, where after hearing Alma’s story one of her boyfriends actually composes a tender tribute song on the spot called “Dick-Alma.”  Wonderfully capturing the awkward age of teenagers, this is a coming-of-age comedy where Alma hopes to reclaim her lost self esteem, where her sexual awakening coincides with her newly developing maturity, where she has to find a way to handle the gossipers and backstabbers that thrive in every small town.  This first time filmmaker hits all the right notes with this one, writing an impressively smart screenplay that obsesses and thrives on teen boredom, a socially observant and delightful romp, drop dead hilarious at times, made even more appealing by the outstanding music from Ginge Anvik. 

2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #9 Everyone Else (Alle Anderen)

EVERYONE ELSE (Alle Anderen)   A- 

Germany  (119 mi)  2009  d:  Maren Ade

The ultimate break-up film, shown here in a deliciously slow burn of insecurities, everything that the highly acclaimed, warm and nostalgia-tinged Olivier Assayas SUMMER HOURS (2008) pretended to be but was “not,” a scathing exposé of social convention, showing the hypocrisy and emptiness of a couple that, like the Wheeler’s in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (2008), want to be unconventional, that doesn’t want to be like “everyone else.”  An extremely provocative film, well-written and intelligently directed by Ade, choosing unusually ordinary or uninteresting lead characters as her subject, a mirror image for the audience to identify with, a self-centered and bored German middle class couple, yet they are onscreen the entire length of the film together, rarely more than arms length away from one another.  With six years between films, plenty of time has passed, yet the distinctive finale of Ade’s last film is still fresh in the viewer’s minds, as the disturbing ambiguity remains unsettling to this day.  In THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (2003), all signs indicate a perfectly ordinary middle class setting, but as the director gets inside the head of a well-meaning teacher who can’t control her class, signs point to a psychological breakdown which the director meticulously details, where one might call Ade an on-the–fringe miserablist, though not full-fledged like Austrian Ulrich Seidl.  Both show a fondness for documentary realism, then embellishing the prevailing social order with remarkably downbeat unpleasantries.  As French director Claude Chabrol passed away this week, I’d like to point out the similarities with his style early in his career, especially the amazingly realistic Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), which for all practical purposes was a breezy lightweight comedy until the final reel which completely re-contextualized everything that came before.  That film was half a century ago, targeting the boredom of lower class working girls all at the same dead end job, an appliance store with few if any customers, while this film sets its sights on the economically successful, well-to-do German middle class, where they encounter so few hardships in their lifetimes that they lose the ability to express dissatisfaction, as they’re always expected to be happy doing whatever they choose, yet freedom becomes a weight they carry on their shoulders.  What’s compelling about the film is the evaporation of the supposed happiness that exists between this couple that hops in the sack at one moment and then has next to nothing to say afterwards or even well into the next day, where their specialty becomes cutting each other to shreds, where they fall under a blistering attack of acid-tinged criticisms hurled with the precision and accuracy of heat-seeking missiles. 

Lars Eidinger is Chris, who is the picture of proper rearing, as he’s intelligent, well-mannered, reserved, polite, soft-spoken, self-aware, yet distant, vacuous, aloof, and unreachable, the kind of guy who always has a book in his hand but has a hard time expressing his ideas.  He fancies himself as an architect, but he hasn’t really broken into the field just yet and has few job offers, so he’s likely still supported by his parents, who are unseen, but their presence is everywhere, as the couple is vacationing at his parent’s villa on the island of Sardinia, and the house reflects his parent’s bourgeois taste.  Birgit Minichmayr is Gitta, the much more unconventional and outgoing between the two, an impulsive girl that has no problem whatsoever speaking what’s on her mind, and can be seen in an early scene interacting with the young daughter of Chris’s sister, urging her to communicate her real feelings, to come right out and say “I hate your guts,” or “I despise you,” eventually pretending to be shot by this kid, falling into the pool acting dead.  It’s a humorous scene the way it’s presented, especially with a charming little girl who plays along, but the same theme continues to play out in various permutations between the couple for the rest of the film.  Their interplay, however, is so naturalistic and their real feelings so disguised that at times you can barely tell there’s tension in the air.  And that’s exactly how the characters see it as well, blind to what’s obvious, and not looking to dig deep enough to uncover what’s under the surface.  The focus of the camera is intimacy, zeroing in on an accumulation of tiny details while capturing the couple in close proximity, always within eye contact, but rarely actually looking at each other.  Gitta continuously confesses her love and never leaves this guy’s side, annoying him with her suffocating presence, yet she’s obviously well-intentioned and has a sexy charm about her possessiveness.  Chris, on the other hand, is more indecisive and aimless and needs room, plenty of it, and the island itself is a visual paradise with what appears to be tropical trees, a jungle-like forest with high grass, and an ocean nearby.  You’d think anyone could get lost in that Edenesque atmosphere, but with these two, it’s like they’re either the first or last two people remaining on earth just waiting for someone to hand them an apple, as they couldn’t be less optimistic about their future together. 

It’s interesting the way Ade chooses to test this couple, as it’s with a stereotypical boorish German male, Hans, actually named Hans-Jochen Wagner, an established architect who’s loud, obnoxious, opinionated and totally condescending, yet he’s continually seeking out Chris as if they’re old school friends.  Chris, on the other hand, has a near phobic desire not to be seen by Hans and is successful for half the film, but once they meet, it’s clear Hans is handing them the apple, as Chris immediately defers to Han’s smug masculinity and sucks the toxic fumes of his pig-headed and overbearing nature, accepting without return a volley of insults directed at himself and Gitta, all with a patronizing air of superiority, where Gitta rises to his defense, but is then abandoned by Chris who thinks her unconventional and outspoken honesty is out of line.  Hans calls her a Brünnhilde defending her man, a reference to the sword carrying, war-like maiden in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which is nothing more than insulting name-calling, one German stereotyping another with an unflattering Nazi-tinged label.  But Chris seems to think it’s OK for Hans to joke around with demeaning insults all told with a smile, but not for Gitta to call him on his noxious contempt for others.  In other words, it’s socially acceptable to insult and disparage others so long as it’s only words, where the manner in which it’s spoken trumps the meaning behind it.  Chris then falls in line with the odious and egotistic behavior of Hans and leaves Gitta dangling on her own.  In perhaps the scene of the film, Chris invites Hans and his more shallow pregnant girlfriend Sana (Nicole Marischka) over for dinner, a social makeup for Gitta’s previous overly blunt outspokenness, where after dinner they show the couple his parent’s villa, carrying drinks up into his mother’s room where Hans immediately disparages his mother’s taste as well, but she’s got a “cool” stereo, which plays the German version of Barry Manilow or Neil Diamond, a live version of Grönemeyer singing a typically popular mainstream love song, “Ich hab dich lieb.”  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VlmB3YWnc8)  Sana reveals her middle-of-the-road mainstream streak as she’s enchanted by the nostalgic simplicity of idealized love, where she and Hans embrace all affectionately over the cheesy lyrics while Chris and Gitta, shown on each side of the perfectly composed frame, may as well be light years away.  That shot alone expresses with poetic clarity just how difficult it is to authentically connect with someone else, because this couple wouldn’t be caught dead with cheap sentiment, but without it, they’re lost in a no man’s land with nothing to connect them together, each stuck inside their own heads instead of one another’s.  Revealing a bonanza of rarely seen truths onscreen, there’s something reminiscent of Bruno Dumont’s contrasting 29 PALMS (2003), featuring a superficial relationship held together by nothing much more than sex, shown as not much of a defense on a desert-like road to nowhere, but here in the luscious palms of a tropical paradise, these much more sharp edged and carefully nuanced characters actually attempt to communicate but fail just as miserably.