Fifteen-year-olds Norway is now becoming an indicator of good cinema, confirming this in different genres more and more extensively. Here and another representative of the cinema of this country turned out to be a perfect example of the history of growing up. To call this film a drama would be too bland, and comedy (as it positions itself) and completely ridiculous. Youth comedy here does not smell at all, which does not exclude a number of funny situations, but in general the main topic is the crisis of high school, teenage love and sexual cognition.
Fifteen-year-old schoolchildren and schoolgirls live in a nondescript village, from which the main characters of this village dream to leave as soon as possible, regularly showing the middle finger of a sign with the name of this area. The scarcity of landscapes, the painted bus stop, the trampoline - as the only entertainment of the local children, a modest palette for choosing a job, scurrying sheep and the lead weight of loneliness, remoteness and exile. And somewhere there is a whole world, in this case limited to the city of Oslo, in which he is drawn to escape.
It is very difficult to put in a modest timekeeping all the issues raised. Here and the sexual fantasies of a teenage girl, when instead of communicating with friends she sees lesbian games, the boss on a part-time job is exposed as a lustful seducer, and a classmate of love interest, only in dreams, sees off to home and playfully falls on the bed. Here are the problems of internal relations in the classroom for an unpopular girl, and the difficulties of relations with a single mother who does not understand her daughter very much in transition. Directly the difficulties of life in the presented conditions and, of course, the theme of love, stretched here is very specific.
Limiting to erotic fantasies only at the very beginning, the subsequent development of the theme of attraction Alma (brilliantly played by Helena Bergsholm), the knowledge of pleasures and the like is represented by a meager set of calls in “phone sex”, the far-fetchedness of what is happening around and scenes of self-satisfaction of the heroine for her own dreams. However, the very fact of special emphasis on the game of the imagination of a teenage girl (thank God, no “Twilight” here does not smell even close, as well as pink snot about sex after marriage and other nonsense, actively drummed everywhere by modern children) plays a key role, leaving the viewer sometimes confused: what is happening on the screen at the moment? What was and what wasn't.
Such a stormy game of fantasies pushes the general routine, life and realism of the narrative into a thin line between the plausible-fictional and the present, with the only difference that dreams here are a little more beautiful and in many ways sudden, unpredictable, and real life around is disturbed only by an escape from home or the final bold inscription above the entrance to school.
The finale of the picture should be noted separately. Without sliding into suicidal hopelessness, without turning an escape from home into a fall into drug addiction or prostitution, without turning to the ashes of dreams about the “big city” and good friends into some dirty rape, betrayal and tragedy of an abandoned defenseless loneliness, the ending follows in bright colors, catching a note of support, love and understanding with each subsequent scene. Here, even the sidelines are not broken by a sudden twist, and the cockroaches in the head and skeletons in the cabinets remain in their places. Because life goes on, moving forward, and ahead of us, as you know, only the best.
8 IZ 10
Original