
The first film written and directed by the grandson of Ingmar Bergman Halfdan Ullmann Tondel spawned a good scene in Armand. We are at a primary school in Norway. Elisabeth has gone to the school to answer a panel of teachers concerning a student. Her six-year-old son, Armand whom we never get to see, or any other children, which is quite bizarre considering that this is a film about children, may have sexually assaulted one of his contemporaries. She gives them that look the look of an interrogated person who will not be interrogated any further, warm toward those who question her because there is nothing predatory that a six-year-old can do. She endures some interview questions regarding microaggressions and in the end, she cackles. In fact, she laughs hysterically.
Elisabeth is Renate Reinsve’s character, who gained prominence for her role in The Worst Person in the World by Joachim Trier. Her laughing outburst which is almost about five minutes long, is one of the great acting moments of this movie. She cannot control the laughingness, which she thinks will never end. When I saw that, I began to contemplate that for an actress I presume it would be more difficult than crying laughing. How do you make everything appear as though it happens by accident? And how do you do it consistently for minutes on end, without a break?
But it is Reinswe ends in a strong laugh, in the middle of laughter came from. It’s laughter if it could be so described, that is vicious and almost tainted with sarcasm, as if underneath that brief chuckle there is a lot more aghast are-you-kidding-me resonance. She is not merely chuckling at the stupidity of the questions put to her. She is ridiculing the notion that makes her take for granted that she fits into some kind of a culture that has reached the degree of this system of control over behavior. That is the reason, her laughter refuses to get confined. The shock, the way she puts it, the shock that made her burst into laughter over and over again, has layers, and the deeper the layer becomes the bigger the exclaiming giggle.
The rest of the film made me wonder whether the coherence of the story, of the theme of the vision, is something that is treasured as it once was.
Armand has an interesting premise (a parent trying to understand her son’s behavior with reference to society’s value systems and activity as a plot). But the film as such is mostly a mess. It keeps throwing stuff at you in an oblique random fashion, and it is written as if there was a plot and it was a jigsaw puzzle only the pieces are missing. Ingmar Bergman emerged towards the latter half of the 20th century as the iconic figure of intellectual cinema, but for all the grandness of his pursuits, Bergman wrote screenplay that was like a whirlpool in that it could draw all the viewer’s attention. On the other hand, Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel beats everyone else by making conversation so cavalier and elliptical it is plainly written in the style of late-period David Mamet but it is amateurishly chaotic.
Ullmann Tøndel fails to realize the significance of completing the storyline, time and again, he leaves in the middle of it, and the majority of what happens is entirely implausible. One wonders why a panel of people who question Elisabeth does so in a classroom and not an office. With the background of what possibly could have happened, what is preventing them from directly stating the accusations and instead, beating about the bush for 45 minutes? The head of the panel is a young, irrelevant trainee teacher, Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) who is clearly very young and inexperienced. But if this is one of the movies’ core themes and Norwegian culture has become overly cautious to an extent where it is psychotic then why would this young girl be in charge in the first place? As the details of the case begin to unfold it is revealed that one of the primary witnesses against Armand’s, Jon, who is just 6 years old, says he was a victim of sexual assault. However, as Elisabeth notes, such words and actions would be extraordinary for a 6-year-old child.
On top of everything else in the already loaded situation, Ullmann Tøndel uses etiological connections and layers of trauma between the characters. Elisabeth and Sarah, Jon’s mother, are sisters-in-law. (Though this is a detail that somehow has not been revealed to us for a long time.) Sarah’s brother, Thomas, who married Elizabeth, is the one who killed himself (and Sarah holds Elisabeth responsible). What is annoying is that there is so much information about people we never see. As well as irritating are the reconstructed old pictures of several characters when they were students of the school hanging in the hall which gives certain parts of the film an inexplicably over the top Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feel. Even an earned thematic device, the recurring nose bleeds, is infused with absurdity. Towards the end of the film, there are a few highlight sequences where the use of words is unnecessary. These include a writhing dance by Elisabeth, and an extreme group body groping in a modern interpretive style. Why are these scenes there? Don’t ask me.
Ullmann Tøndel endows the school with his trademark stylisation of a part sinister, The dark tones turned the corridors into a confusing labyrinth and somehow we stick with the film waiting for the pieces to fall into place. Yes, I could yammer on about the annoying plot devices Armand forced upon the film. But let me pose a question that critics rarely have the courage to ask. Who is this film meant for? Who would watch it? Who, apart from the festival audience, would want to wade through the incoherence? Yes, Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is quite talented (well, he directed that scene with Burstow), but in the words of Ingmar Bergman who looked down from auteur heaven: “Please do a rewrite.”
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