A Film a Week - Border / Gräns

Are we ready for a fresh, new view of trolls (of Nordic folklore, not internet lore sort)? You know, the creatures waiting under bridges with clubs in their hands, bashing the skulls of people and hobbits? Ready or not, this is what we are going to get in the sophomore feature by Denmark-based Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi following his astonishing atmospheric Gothic horror Shelley, already covered here on the blog. Border, based on a story by John Ajvide Lyndquist, the writer of the cult vampire book and film Let the Right One in, is a genre-blurring experience that revitalises socially charged Scandinavian noir with the elements of body- and folk-horror, while also digging into the philosophical depths.

At first, everything looks like yet another depressing social thriller. We meet Tina (veteran stage and screen actress Eva Melander in lots of prosthetic make-up), an awkward, almost fiendish customs officer working at the port somewhere in Sweden. She seems antisocial, but her special talent is to smell human emotion like shame, guilt or rage. That is the way for her to detect a supposedly cultivated businessman that is smuggling child pornography, which leads her being added to a national police task force on the case of exposing the ring. Outside working hours, she lives in the cabin in the woods with never do well Roland (an interesting turn by Jörgen Thorsson) who seems to pay more attention to his dangerous dogs and trash television than to her who spends most of her free time walking naked in the forest, communicating to wild animals and taking skinny dips in the lake. Other than that, she regularly visits her father that is slipping to dementia (Sten Ljunggren) in a retirement home, trying to resurface some of the family secrets with little to no luck.

Her world changes dramatically when she meets on of her clients / suspects named Vore (Finnish actor Eero Milonoff). The mask is the same, same prehistoric-looking forehead, wide nose, ugly teeth and bloated cheeks, so she assumes they are suffering from the same condition. He initially tries to keep her at distance with his attitude, but she is more intrigued and aroused than she feels rejected. The catch is the thing they are suffering from is not a “chromosome defect”, but a whole another thing, so the way she saw her complete life will never be same, which leads to a ton of questions about humankind.

Abbasi and his co-writer Isabella Eklöf expended the script from Lyndquist’s story as best as they could, but it feels choppy and generic at moments, especially in the first half when the procedural plot line drags a bit. Later on, as the new, fantastic and outlandish elements are introduced, Abbasi shows that he can handle them with tact and style, and he dares to go places seldom filmmakers would, like the signature sex scene. With trolls on the table, Abbasi channels the energy of early Peter Jackson and ripe David Cronenberg in the terms of body horror and blending it with the eternal questions (how come we as humans are capable of doing atrocities to other species’ babies?), as well as the timely ones regarding the racism in Sweden and the rest of the developed world, while the folk part serves as an attractive costume.

Border is a stunning-looking film, thanks to the cinematography by Nadim Carlsen (who also shot Abbasi’s previous film), convincing visual effects supervised by Peter Hjorth and the fine work in the make-up department. Let us not forget the actors, especially the leading duo who do wonders even under the heavy masks, channelling some genuine and complex emotions in this smart piece of artsy genre filmmaking.

A Film a Week - A Hustler's Diary / Maste gitt

Imagine a talkative low-level gangster doing a voice-over narration pointing that his life has changed dramatically because of a certain stream of occurrences. Add a bit working-class / low-life slang to it and some humour just to make it more interesting. Congratulations, you have got your basic gangster flick in which the tone can vary from a bit self-serious drama to full-throttle comedy. Now, transfer the whole thing from the usual context of Guy Ritchie’s London, Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles or Martin Scorsese’s New York to something different. Something European. Scandinavian. Maybe Swedish.

Is not Sweden a welfare state with low crime rate? It is and it is not, depending from the viewpoint. It is quite a nice place to live if one gets to the middle class or even a bit higher up the social ladder. Unfortunately, that kind of life is not always an option for someone of immigrant descent, especially if they are not promising athletes or artists. They are usually confined to some kind of ethnic ghetto located far enough from the city centre, ruled by unwritten rules, where crime could prove to be a viable option. Sometimes we get a chance to see that kind of life in Swedish films that aim for more realistic feeling. Sometimes we just see them portrayed like nameless, menacing criminal stereotypes.

The good news is that Ivica Zubak, the co-writer / director of A Hustler’s Diary, is of immigrant origins himself (born in Croatia), so he actually understands the complexity of the problem, and his view of the topic does not look like yet another potential minor theatre hit, nor it seems like an “over-medicated” (doctored) festival drama. His debut feature Dreams was a tense drama, on the verge of becoming a thriller, set in a similar milieu like his newest film that takes more clues from crime-comedies.

Our narrator guy is Metin Turkoglu (co-writer Can Demirtas), a small-time burglar and hustler who remembers the wise words of his late father that a person should plant a tree, write a book and have a child before the final moment. With the first task already done and while waiting for a suitable partner for the third one, he zealously keeps his diary as a source material for some future book project in which he describes his and his friends’ not particularly legal adventures. However, being smart enough and dreaming big enough, he dreams of switching his career of crime for something more respectful, like becoming an actor.

A botched audition for acting studies at the national academy ends with him losing his book. It is found by one of the professors (famous actress Lena Endre playing herself) and shown to her hipster publisher buddy Puma (Jörgen Thorsson), so instead of acting, Metin gets the chance for writing career. The trouble is that all the names, places and events in his “book” are as real as it gets. If the book gets published, his life on the mean streets of Stockholm project-building suburbia will be in a great danger.

Sincerity of the portrait of immigrant life and crime as a social mobility shortcut aside, A Hustler’s Diary works best as a darkly funny crime comedy. Lost diary might seem like a typical plot device leading the story down the predictable path, but Demirtas’ and Zubak’s script is smart enough to throw us a curveball every now and then and therefore keep us entertained. Some of the dialogue gets lost in translation, since its verbal humour component is actually based on the differences between street and standard language. Zubak also deserves kudos for his sense of directing. He works well with actors, most of them seen in his previous works, and shows admirable control of the rhythm of the film. On the other hand, the visuals sometimes leave a lot to be desired and the contrast between the city and immigrant suburbs could have been accented better, but slamming the film because of that might seem as nitpicking.

A Film a Week - Shelley

A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.

Who would say, some 50 years ago, that some of the people of 21^st century’s developed West would live a simple, technology-free life by their own choice? Self-sustainability and organic food is often the mantra for the upper classes in Western society, life without running water or electricity is just taking the same thing to the extreme, and energy healing just gives it a dash of esoteric touch. But the new concepts are just one of the themes of Ali Abbasi’s debut feature Shelley, a complex, slow-burning chamber horror.

The title obviously refers to Mary Shelley and her milestone novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus with its theme of new concepts of science and technology taking over religion in everyday life. Now new concepts or variations of old, primitive and obsolete ones are taking over some other. The times are changing constantly and our creativity is not following it all the way. There are no mechanical creatures, but the reference is beautifully woven into the very fabric of the film and into its main subject: it is the name of a baby that will change the relationships between the mother, the father and the surrogate mother, initially the couple’s Romanian housekeeper.

The film opens with a sequence of a “man of the house”, Kaspar (Peter Christophersson) driving the new housekeeper Elena (Cosmina Stratan of Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills) through the woods to the idyllic compound by the lake, explaining her the duties. Mainly, she will be there to help his wife Louise (Ellen Dorrit Petersen of Eskil Vogt’s masterpiece Blind) who is recovering from an operation that left her scarred physically and emotionally with the house and the farm.

The life there is pretty simple and it perplexes Elena, but she has no time to dwell on it. Her main goal is to stay there for a period of time enough for her to save the money to buy her own apartment in Bucharest. It might be hard and even quirky, especially when a long-haired healer comes to “do his magic” on Louise, leaving Elena unimpressed, but it is cosy and the two women of different world-views, classes, cultures and priorities quickly become friends. And that is enough for Louise to ask and Elena to accept to bear her child in a conversation over a bottle of wine.

Once when the pregnancy takes an unexpected turn, as the pregnancies tend to do, especially in a secluded environment, the dynamics are changed and the loyalties are shifted. Elena develops a series of negative reactions to the baby, physical and psychological, from common things like nausea and rash to paranoia and strong belief that the baby she is carrying is evil. Simultaneously, for Louise the well-being of the baby becomes the only issue, and Elena is being relegated from the status of a friend to the status of a vessel.

There is no doubt that the relationships that mothers forge with their children are the strongest ones and they affect not just two of them, but also their environment. The film’s third act of the film tackles the subject in a new and refreshing way. It is not about the surrogacy, the surrogacy is just a metaphor of class divide between the West and the East, rich and poor and the patronising attitude of former to the latter. It is about the inherent pathology of motherhood and parenthood in general that can take many different forms, some socially acceptable, some not.

The script by Barabbas and Maren Louise Käehen is intelligent and innovating and it is highlighted with Abbasi’s sense of direction, deliberate pacing and creating the atmosphere of paranoia and dread opposing the beautiful, peaceful nature in the surroundings. The fact is, however, that, as the plot progresses, Abbasi is more and more playing with typical horror clichés, like nightmares, but stays subtle enough not to overplay it. The change of cinematographer and the format from 16:9 to wide-screen halfway through is a nice addition and it shows Abbasi’s unique vision. Together with memorable, compelling performances by two fine actresses, that makes Shelley a stunningly complex and controlled debut and a strong piece of horror cinema that can play well with both genre and art house audiences.