Border (Gräns)

Finnish actor Eero Milonoff and Swedish actress Eva Melander

Director Ali Abbasi

BORDER (Gräns)                  B                    

Sweden  Denmark  (101 mi)  2018 ‘Scope  d:  Ali Abbasi

Born in Iran but now working in Sweden, this is Abbasi’s follow-up to his gothic horror thriller SHELLEY (2016), creating a bizarre mix of Nordic mythological folklore and supernatural fantasy that was the surprise winner of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.  Abassi started his career as a writer, intrigued by the magical realism of South American writers like Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes, especially how they combined fantasy and realism to create a more intense story, where dreams and hallucinations become part of everyday life.  Adapted from the opening story of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2005 short story collection Let the Old Dreams Die, the same writer of Tomas Alfredson’s vampire film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008), the film is a striking balance between the supernatural and the mundane, with much of it taking place in the minds of the characters, much like Joachim Trier’s 2017 Top Ten List #4 Thelma, which is more of a character study, while this might be considered a darkly romantic horror story.  Among the better directed films seen this year, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into one of the better films.  Abbasi is brilliant in establishing atmosphere and mood, with an incredible electronic music score from Christoffer Berg and Martin Dirkov, while the lush cinematography is provided by Nadim Carlsen, immediately luring the audience into an alternate world, featuring Swedish actress Eva Melander as Tina, completely unrecognizable under a silicone mask that took 4 to 5 hours to apply each day, working at a ferry terminal customs check point, where she can sense the mood of the person, whether they may be guilty or filled with shame, and then sniffs out the illegal contraband.  Her unique talent is accepted by her fellow inspectors, viewed as exceptional in her duties, as she’s so accurate.  But she has a monstrous look about her, perhaps the result of a physical deformity, yet she acts normal in her position, always discreetly polite to the passengers, yet the way she sniffs out what she senses is so bizarre that it’s always good for a laugh, as it seems so animalistic, like a hound dog on the trail.  Because of the precise detail of her work, however, the audience accepts her extrasensory gift without question, realizing she’s extraordinarily effective at what she does.  If truth be told, however, this sniffing method has been seen before in Bruno Dumont’s L’HUMANITÉ (1999), which also features a police inspector who may or may not be human, who intensely sniffs his suspects, yet the weirdness of his mannerisms was peculiarly off-putting throughout, but it didn’t prevent David Cronenberg’s jury from awarding nonprofessional actor Emmanuel Schotté the Best Actor award at Cannes. 

Things begin to change when Tina encounters her mirror image in Vore, Finnish actor Eero Milonoff, so good as the overdriven manager in The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (Hymyilevä mies) (2016), also unrecognizable in a similar silicone mask, where he seems happy to have his bag inspected, curious what her response will be, as he collects worms and insects, placing them inside a canister that resembles a bomb.  After a brief look she allows him to pass, more intrigued personally than professionally, especially when the two sniff each other, which the audience will get a kick out of, as it’s too comically absurd to ignore.  In another film they’d be an alien species, perhaps defined by their differences, but in this film they co-exist with the rest of the human race, deformed creatures following the same rules and guidelines, where they’ve become part of the world we live in.  It’s an oddly compelling premise, but the John Carpenter-style soundtrack adds depth and space, elevating their interior world, becoming something wondrous to behold.  In no time Tina is called into the office of a police investigator, asking how she was able to detect an incriminating device of stored child pornographic material placed in someone’s cellphone, explaining she can just sense these things.  “Is it really possible to smell what people are feeling?”  Viewers already know the answer.  The inspector asks for help in identifying a specific location where these crimes are occurring, having narrowed it down to a general region.  Curiously, this subplot about a pedophile ring was not in the original Lindqvist story, but may be paying homage to his earlier novel Let the Right One In, where the pedophile subplot was omitted from the film.  What’s surprising is just how completely accepted Tina is in the police investigative business, treated as an invaluable resource, as she unearths evidence no human could find.  Tina has a home next to a forest, where she’s able to commune with animals, also visit a pristinely beautiful lake that looks unspoiled and unchanged since the world began.  She has an odd roommate that she describes as her boyfriend, Roland (Jörgen Thorsson), but their relationship is sexless, as he’s void of ambition or love, spending his time drinking and tending to his prized Dobermans.  It’s when Vore visits again that things get interesting, as he undergoes a personal search where her partner discovers he is a she, as he has female sex organs.  Curiously, he also has similar scars and markings on his body, where she had always been told about chromosomal abnormalities to explain her deformities.  Interestingly, Tina also visits her elderly father in a senior center, Sten Ljunggren from Lukas Moodysson’s Together (Tillsammans) (2000), where he clearly has deteriorating memory issues.  But when she asks about the scars, he offers a simple explanation that sounds reasonable, but could hardly explain the exact same marking on two different people. 

Accepting all her deformities, Tina is at peace with the surrounding natural world, and can even sense when animals are about to cross the road, waiting patiently in her car for them to magically appear, while resigning herself to living as an outsider on the margins of society.  But meeting Vore alters that perception, as he accepts her the way she is, wanting nothing changed.  He has a bit of an attitude himself, proudly displaying his differences, which is something he’s not ashamed of, feasting on the bugs and insects he collects, finding them incredibly tasty, offering some to Tina, which she also devours.  When Tina invites Vore to move into her guest cabin, things heat up, as the two of them find an irresistible animal attraction between them, though not at first, where Roland appears to be the outsider, the odd man out.  When he takes his dogs to a dog show, though, the two are left alone on the premises, allowing their true nature to reveal itself.  What happens next is better experienced than described, curiously unworldly, though their foreplay resembles Klingon love from Star Trek, yet it’s mostly a shock to the system, and a revelation for Tina, who no longer has to hide, but is actually appreciated, finding it a completely liberating experience.  It’s an interesting metaphor for minorities and people who are different, so easily ostracized from communities, yet have the same need for love and companionship as anyone else, human or otherwise.  Vore supplies many of the missing pieces about her childhood and their strange culture, suggesting there are others like them in hiding in Finland, yet he also has an aversion to humans, finding them weak and selfish, believing they are diabolically evil and should get what they deserve, offering weird implications about exacting revenge.  Tina, on the other hand, exhibits no sense of vengeance, thinking not all humans are evil, and she’d prefer no one gets hurt, wondering if that’s a human quality.  But it’s clear her father has been hiding secrets from her, much like the parents in 2017 Top Ten List #4 Thelma, who were afraid of their child’s supernatural power if unleashed onto the world.  Thelma also wanted to use her powers for good and actually despised the idea of pain and retribution.  Tina is an incredibly well thought out character and Melander does wonders in the role, but some might find it too weird and grotesque to experience a significant emotional impact, valuing mood and special effects over any human drama, despite the exquisite direction that keeps viewers engaged throughout.  But good and evil are universal considerations, where this film takes us to both extremes, examining what it is to be human and non-human, while also questioning the moral values of living in both worlds.  One is not inherently more evil, but may act that way sometimes as a means to protect themselves from the fire and brimstone hurled in their direction.  There’s plenty of Nordic mythology depicted in this film, including a species “chased by lightning,” perhaps penance for their wrongdoing from mythical times, but what’s clear is audiences haven’t seen a pair of lovers like this, deserving plenty of credit for originality. 

Together (Tillsammans)

Lukas Moodysson on the set of Together (2000)

 

TOGETHER (Tillsammans)        C+                

Sweden  Denmark  Italy  (106 mi)  2000  d:  Lukas Moodysson

Where are those happy days, they seem so hard to find
I tried to reach for you, but you have closed your mind
Whatever happened to our love?
I wish I understood
It used to be so nice, it used to be so good.

—Abba, “S.O.S.” (1975) Abba - S.O.S - YouTube  (3:32)

There's strength in being alone, that's just bullshit. Only thing worth anything is being together.  

—Birger (Sten Ljunggren)

Living in a collective doesn’t mean you have to reject everything.  

—Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren)

We draw the line at Coca-Cola. We don't support multinational pigs.         

—Lasse (Ala Rapace)

Not so much a 60’s as a 70’s film, revealing the pathetic unravelings of the revolution, circa Stockholm, 1975, in a small leftist commune where a group of twentysomethings continue to hold onto their political ideals, but for whatever reason, life keeps getting in the way.  While it’s a series of mini-tragedies, Moodysson douses the film with plenty of dark comedy, where his singularly best choice is observing the world through the eyes of the collective’s children.  While the film is stylistically observant, using fades to a blank red screen, it’s overly predictable and never really addresses the social issues, which are only superficially used to tie together a movie about marital discord.  The children’s story is far more interesting, though Moodysson instead satirizes the misguided yearnings and foibles of adults.  The film opens with a marriage on the rocks, where Rolf, a young Michael Nyqvist from THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY (2009), is a drunken lout of a husband that crosses the line into physical abuse, causing his wife Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren) to gather up her two young children aged 13 and 10, Eva and Stefan (Emma Samuelsson and Sam Kessel), and head for the home of her brother Göran (Gustaf Hammarsten) in an already crowded communal house called Tillsammans (Swedish for “Together”), spied upon by the neighbors next door who can’t believe how many people can fit into one house.  Neither child has any friends at school and are already outcasts, but this only makes their prospects more dismal, especially being driven around in an old, dilapidated, hand-painted VW bus, a relic from a 60’s hippie era that has long since past being cool with young kids, feeling more like an embarrassment.  And therein lies one of the themes of the film, as adults often behave like idiots, where this film written by the director continues to poke fun at the foolishness of middle class youths pretending to be working class heroes by taking a stand against coca cola, becoming vegetarians, abolishing Christmas, refusing to own a TV, having open sexual relationships within the commune, carrying on a Marxist driven dialectic even as they are children of wealth, where the wealthiest one among them is attempting a blue collar job as a welder, and failing miserably.  It’s a bit like Fassbinder’s THE THIRD GENERATION (1979), but less overtly political, not nearly as devastating a critique of the radical left, and more of a series of satirical vignettes showing just how out of touch this group is with their own feelings, their children, and the changing world around them.    

Throughout the film there is incessant squabbling and sarcastic in-fighting between collective members, surrounded by posters of Che, Emma Goldman, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Mao, arguing whether doing the dishes is bourgeois, each one ridiculing the phony left-leaning sentiment of the other, where Lasse (Ala Rapace) claims his separated wife Anna (Jessica Liedberg) has become a lesbian by choice for political reasons, where her meditation sessions are really rather feeble attempts to hit on other women.  Denouncing men in general, Ana is the likely person to befriend Elisabeth, where the two commiserate over the evils of overcontrolling male dominance while drinking plenty of wine, getting giddy after awhile, playing music and dancing well after the kids have gone to sleep, showing little consideration for anyone else, thinking this is all part of the healing process, recovering from the inherent subjugation of women.  Elisabeth’s brother Göran may be the one most concerned with getting along with everyone, incessantly avoiding conflict, but his girlfriend Lena (Anja Lundqvist) couldn’t be more sexually promiscuous, taking advantage of Göran’s passivity while sexually stalking other members of the male species like the collective’s nymphomaniac, targeting Erik (Olle Sarri), who may be the youngest and in her eyes the cutest member, but also the most radically outspoken, as despite coming from a family of wealth where his father is a banker, Erik is an unashamed, old-school Communist that believes in meetings, strikes, demonstrations, leftist newspapers, and carrying on the Marxist rhetoric whenever and wherever, where his idea of sexual foreplay is having a Marxist discussion analyzing the ill-effects of capitalism, agreeing to have sex with Lena only if they’ll have a conversation on economics afterwards.  When she, of course, has sex but then reneges on the deal, he calls her a lying hypocrite and wants nothing more to do with her.  His leftist zeal is amusing, especially when he attempts to radicalize a lone sentry standing outside some important government building.  But when he eventually moves out, thoroughly disgusted at the collective’s lack of leftist willpower, Lena cries for days afterwards, calling so much attention to herself that even Göran gets fed up.  But when Lasse and Göran bring home a used TV for the kids, one of the other couples moves out as well, claiming that’s a complete sellout. 

Part of the developing story also includes the abandoned and isolated lives of kids, where the adults are so wrapped up in their own problems the kids are largely left to fend for themselves, where Eva ends up sitting in the VW van all hours of the day and night just to get away from the arguing and idiotic behavior of the adults inside whose politics she finds stupid.  It’s here she meets the kid next door, Frederik (Henrik Lundström), equally friendless, from a similarly dysfunctional family, where both are shy introverts that are at least nice to one another.  Stefan, on the other hand, pulls out his legos toys, where Tet, Ana and Lasse’s son, can’t believe they’re the real thing, as his dad promised to make wooden legos but pathetically only finished two pieces.  It’s ironic that a kid named Tet, after the Tet Offensive, is not allowed to play with war toys, but the kids instead play Pinochet electric shock torture games.  Stefan readily misses his Dad, who on the side is attempting to rehabilitate his life, but failing miserably.  In contrast to the turbulent world of the very publicly out front collective, Rolf’s struggle is more internal, where working as a plumber, after finishing a repair, one of his customers offers him a beer, Birger (Sten Ljunggren), that results in an extended drinking session where we learn Birger is now an old man that once drove his wife away and longed for freedom and his own anticipated sense of independence, but discovered that “loneliness is the most horrible thing in the world.”  With Rolf and Birger struggling with their self-inflicted misery, the collective is also disintegrating before our eyes, as personal interests trump the collective spirit, a utopian principle only half-heartedly adhered to anyway, where the ideas fade sort of like LP records giving way to the 8-track, cassettes, CD’s, and now MP3’s.  Nonetheless, it’s the collective’s hold on Elisabeth as a place of refuge that may as well be the Berlin Wall to Rolf, as he can’t get through to the other side.  With the help and encouragement of Birger, who wants to make sure Rolf doesn’t end up like he did, the finale is easily the best part of the film, where Elisabeth’s favorite song comes into play, Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” nazareth love hurts (1976) YouTube (3:32), emblematic of the couple’s own tortuous ordeal, but after a bellyful of unending pessimism, the snowy finale to the upbeat music of Abba, which bookends the film, adds an unforeseen sense of optimism and hope.