Stockholm’s under-belly of punk

This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)

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7 May

This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)

Maybe skip this section if you are less interested in punk attitude, more just in the film…

Perhaps Swedish punk, rather than imports from the States and the UK, were factually what a thirteen-year-old girl, whose elder brother had been into punk, would be listening to in 1982*. However, in the light of visiting three of the four Scandinavian countries (Finland excepted) around this time, it does seem unlikely – and knowing what, for example, German and Norwegian speakers have said about songs in their language not working, and so singers / listeners choosing English for their lyrics, more so.

Language and lyrics are a part of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013), so it is a shame that the sub-titles do not always seem plausible – is the heckling, in Swedish, really as frank and harsh as the words Communist cunts render it ? (Likewise, unless there were a family tradition of the usage, would a girl her age saying ‘Screw dessert !’ to her mother, in a tussle over going out, seem unnoticed ? (Instead, the mother just replies to the effect that the estranged father, the girl and she will not ‘screw dessert’, but the girl will help her make it, and it will be nice.))

Maybe upping the stakes in translation was intended to make the teenagers’ rebellious nature seem stronger (since they are punks), but the apparent mismatch with context and with people’s reactions seems to suggest that it was an ill-judged strategy. The mother laying down the law, for example, takes no visible offence at the word ‘screw’, when she surely would, since she is dictating what her daughter will do, if it is inappropriate : one is left wishing that one knew in what register the exchange really took place, rather than in the version overlaid by ‘the translation’.


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All this is by the by[e] for some, but the Swedishness of everything makes it impossible to tell how much, if anything, of the punk scene is real, rather than invented – a matter of intrigue to some**, but one which may not bother others at all… (Though, when a group of girls try to do a stage routine, in the school concert, to Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’, we are spot on in time for 1982.)

We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013) reminds a little of another recent film, The Rocket (2013), but also – inevitably – of The Commitments (1991) (let alone, in its wake, The Sapphires (2012))***. Yet, as commented, it distinguishes itself from these others by having a different heart, a different pull, from that, say, of Sitthiphon Disamoe in The Rocket, as Ahlo, a ‘fixer’ – although the overwhelming feeling is likewise that of people being brought together (where this film ends****).

The school concert, mentioned in passing above, is where Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) realize that they have overlooked, and underestimated, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) – we have already seen the pair (under the catty pressure from fellow students at the lunch table to conform and look like them) refuse to normalize. At this stage, we may not realize that Bobo is female (jazzer Bobo Stenson is definitely a man), because the other two appear to be addressing Klara and Bobo as if one of them is male*****.

In a beautifully casual way, they have formed a band – essentially Let’s play, because this band [Iron Fist : possibly a reference to Sweden’s Soviet past ?] is crap, which is a fairly earthy punk attitude, if ever there were one… Hedvig, initially, fits in because maybe, Klara and Bobo conclude, they could use her – not knowing, as we do not, where her engagement will take them. That emergence of Hedvig, responding to them as they respond to her, and with God thrown in for good measure, is the joy of the film.

As to the dynamic, with Bobo sometimes more serious than her often frivolous mother’s friends (happily playing Spin the Bottle at a party), she can sound quite alarmingly sage when she makes a reasoned assertion. Yet one can easily believe that this tempering of and firing off each other is why Klara and she have been friends for so long, as complementing each other, rather than as opposites. (It is not for nothing that a larger girl is not unusual in being a companion to a slender one.)

Having said this, although the film is a good and thoughtful one, it does take a while to bed down, just at the time when one wants to start feeling part of it and perhaps has started to despair of being able to do so. Call that a tease, if you like, but it cannot be the full intention, since the film relies not on alienating us, but on engendering an interest in and affection for the efforts that Klara, Bobo and Hedvig are making.

So an audience needs to be patient with the film, allow it the odd uneven moment (even when it has established itself), and be taken along by Klara’s energy as a driving force for much of what happens, but also Hedvig’s quiet rebelliousness mixed with good sense, and Bobo’s envious uncertainty.


End-notes

* Maybe, though, with the Swedo-centric nature of the featured music, we have a reflection of cultural bias in Sweden to the home grown (one that certainly helped Fredrik Gertten with legal obstacles to releasing Bananas !*, whose story is told effectively in Big Boys Gone Bananas !* (2011)).

At any rate, the libertarian picture painted in this film, mainly of Stockholm, but also of outlying areas (with a debate about whether one is a mere suburb or a city, and whether the inhabitants of another are (sic) ‘retards’), extends to adult sexual promiscuity and drug usage, but firmly not to minors consuming alcohol – and, contrary to the translation’s hutzpah, the three girls do not seem brazenly defiant to their parent(s).

** Not least viewers of films such as those of Shaun Jefford and Don Letts – respectively, Beijing Punk (2010), and Punk : Attitude (2005).

*** However, it is only really the sense of striving that feels similar in the former, and the latter, strong though the music is, lacked any cohesion beyond the loose notion that the group of performers should (be encouraged to) play soul because they were ‘black’ – there is precious little, beside (and between) the set-pieces, to constitute a story, just a few links.

**** That said, the credits are artfully integrated into the closing moment, and you will not want / be able to miss them…

***** Yes, those subtitles (again) seem to interpose a little difficulty, because the person responsible for bringing them to the screen has not only paired them, but brought them up contrary to our expectations, so that they make us confuse who said what to whom…




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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Let’s make an agreement… ~ Francis

This is a review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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This is a review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Thanks to @CamPicturehouse's Wes Anderson series, @THEAGENTAPSLEY reports on the wonder of The Darjeeling Limited : http://t.co/E2kNoFdK2k
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 24, 2014

Francis’ (Owen Wilson’s) brothers Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) may have some notion as to why they are in India with him, but we just suddenly start the film by seeing Peter run and make a train that businessman Bill Murray misses*, joining Jack and Francis on the gaily painted several carriages that constitute The Darjeeling Limited. One frankly does not care whether up-market independent train operators such as the Bengal Lancer and this one are a reality in India – one buys into it, because of the sheer persuasiveness of Wes Anderson’s directorial / writing vision :

Just as with the poignantly elaborate set of luggage, Anderson is packaging a concept just for the film, and we do not so much as hesitate to legitimize it with our attention and belief. (Likewise, The Grand Budapest and its mountain perch patently do not exist, but that is the whole point : in that film, the wholly deliberate irony is that the Author who, when younger, met an older Zero, who told of Gustave H. and their earlier adventures and fate, is investing with meaning a story about a non-existent place, and we laugh and cry about it even so.)

The feature, however, is – as stipulated – preceded by a short called Hotel Chevalier (2007), which involves Jack, the room in the hotel in which he has ensconced himself for quite a while (elaborately customizing it), an item of that monogrammed luggage, and a call from and the arrival of Natalie Portman as the woman who has hurt him in some way. The encounter is loaded with suppressed energy, yet at the same time seems low key, with questions and quick-fire, almost knee-jerk, answers, as if this is the endgame to a hard-fought game of chess, reduced to its essentials : she says that she will feel bad in the morning, if they have intercourse, and he responds with ‘That’s OK with me !’.

Such feelings, under the surface but maybe not (fully) acknowledged by either party, prepare us for what is to follow. For the trip on which Peter joins Jack and Francis is on the latter’s obsessive terms (who, we later see, gets it all from their mother Patricia (Anjelica Huston)) – assisted by the enigmatic Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky), who has been engaged to devise, print and even laminate the itinerary as a convenient card, the trip progresses, trying to get spirituality from scheduled stops at this or that holy place.

One is reminded a little, by the trio’s shakes of the head at nothing happening when they have completed some ritual, of the moment, in Beckettt’s Endgame**, when Hamm, Clov and Nagg (three other males), on Hamm's injunction Let us pray to God, adopt 'Attitudes of prayer' : when, afterwards, all three say that nothing took place, Hamm concludes The bastard ! He doesn’t exist***. This ‘reporting back’ is one of the film’s routines, and there is a comic inevitability that this or that procedure hasn’t worked because Peter and / or Jack did not ‘do it properly’.

Through these stipulated activities from Francis, through Jack’s lust, and through Peter embracing danger – as well as from their casual abuse of pain-killers (coincidentally, they also feature throughout Endgame), and even cough liquid (reminiscent of Beijing Punk’s Madame Pearl’s syrup ) – we come to know them all, their inability to keep secrets, their failure to abide by the agreements that Francis procures, and the rebellion that covers mourning, a sense of irredeemable loss.

What does work for them is an event that is entirely off programme, and which sees the trio, going native in Darjeeling Limited pyjamas, where they had not expected to be, but where they are graciously included in what happens. We see them enter into it in slow motion, just as Peter caught the train at the beginning, but this seems fitting, no affectation. The pyjamas are what they offer as the best that they have to fit in, and that is how they come to relate to where they are, rather than continuing to expect the spiritual to come to order.

If you glance quickly at the publicity cut-out for The Darjeeling Limited (2007), it looks like it could patronize India - how untrue !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 20, 2014

Anderson has achieved a rare and lovely thing with this film : not the over-reverential approach of the British in A Passage to India (1984), where India seems so ‘other’ that it is always going to remain at a distance, and not the mixture of the worst of what is almost frivolity and of predictability in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) (such as a hotel not as expected****, run by the stereotypical entrepreneurial dreamer without substance, and where racism can be charmed away by generosity and hospitality).

To which @CamPicturehouse's publicity for the Wes Anderson retrospective draws attention, a friend spotted Grand Budapest's animated look...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 23, 2014

Instead, Darjeeling gives us an immaculately structured work (including the unusual frisson of an apparently separate prelude to the main act), which has been put together and filmed so carefully, with Anderson’s heightened sense of a unity of composition, that it seems to be in the same relation to India, but no less true than, Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (from 1910) to the jungle : our appreciation is heightened by our awareness of the technique behind the art. Plus, of course, the three strong central performances (all of them are Anderson regulars), in which Brody probably has the edge for presence, but Wilson has done some of his best work, and (with Roman Coppola) Schwartzman also co-wrote the script.

20 ways to turn your life into a wesandersonmovie http://t.co/Taz9cGFM95 via @iD_magazine
— Bath Film Festival (@BathFilm) March 13, 2014

End-notes

* A paradigm for life ? How often do we say I missed the boat on that one ?

** Faber & Faber, London, 1964, pp. 37–38.

*** An utterance censored by order of The Lord Chamberlain (when there was such an office), and required to be something more tame.

**** According to IMDb, the British visitors are ‘retirees’, which logically implies that another person (‘the retiror / retirer’) has retired them, not that they retired.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

With apologies to Shaun...

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 February

I caught Shaun Jefford’s stylish film when it was first shown at Cambridge Film Festival (England) in 2010 – an impromptu adjournment to the bar before the screen was ready both gave everyone who still wanted one the chance to buy a drink to take in (a wonderful feature of the Arts Picturehouse cinema), and allowed informal contact with the director. That opportunity was extended by a Q&A, both after the screening, and back in the bar, so this review is informed by what he had to say.

[Through what must be some obscure weighting and / or averaging, and despite having topped the audience top 10 during and immediately after the close of the festival, Beijing Punk finished . (The top film had only three reviews, none written by an ordinary member of the audience, but all of which awarded five stars out of five.)

Although this is a creditable placing, it is not immediately apparent how one can understand its not having been higher still, when it had twenty audience reviews (including a 500-word one, on which this is based) on the festival web-site. By contrast with those of the top film, none of them had been written by those on the festival staff or its student reviewers, and all but one gave it five stars (the other being four stars).]

The enthusiastic first festival reviews alone made clear that Beijing Punk – the title neatly tells one everything to expect! – deserves a wider audience than many art-house documentaries, and, with the increasing identification of and also with its merits that it is gaining, it is likely to reach one. (That recognition is by no means just because, at one point, Shaun daily downed two bottles of Madame Pearl’s codeine-laden cough-medicine to get it made – although that obviously wins respect! – and I must return later to what has been called his ‘immersion’ in the totality of the life of the bands whom he features here!).

I call Shaun’s film ‘stylish’, because I see it as in the nature of punk rock that it has its own, specifically anti-establishment, style. It was Siouxsie’s distinctive sound, look and eye make-up, for example, that made me such an adherent (acolyte?) of The Banshees from the early days, along with her inescapably hip way of doing just about everything. Of course, her image was a unity with that of the whole band’s provocative lyrics, moody and suitably jolting harmonies (including edgy multiple-tracking), a strong drummer, and evocative lighting, both on stage and heightening atmosphere in videos. All those, amongst other things, were part and parcel of what made the songs’ delivery so effective, whether the doomed ‘Christine, the strawberry girl’, or the not-so-happy ‘Happy House’.

(For the benefit of those who might think that this review has simply gone off the rails, please try to trust, and without doubting, that there was more than a little echo of Siouxsie’s spirit – for want of a better word – in the girl drummer of featured band Hedgehog.)

Others would, responding to what ‘punk’ means to them, more naturally go to the more clearly raw and untamed (or even often untuned) sounds of punk, but this truly is ‘a broad movement’. For me, Don Letts is clearly right, in his documentary about this scene called Punk: Attitude, to home in on this question of the bands’ stance towards life, which is established by quoting key players talking about what punk is.

For this reason, I would argue that two-tone had just as much the attitude or spirit of this era as more aggressive or maybe threatening bands such as The Pistols or The Clash, and the times could, happily and largely without strain, embrace (or, more likely, those bands could) music as diverse as that of Madness, Blondie, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and The Jam.

This apparent diversion from directly talking about Shaun’s achievement is actually to allow commentary on how it is that ?, Demerit and Hedehog are all a completely recognizable part of punk and yet still quite different from each other. What the bands, as groups and as their members, share is an attitude to the world that might loosely be called that of non-acceptance of the status quo and even of rebellion.

This is truly what brings a skinhead whose consumption of substances is phenomenal into the same arena as a hard-hitting female drummer, because the images of her with boxing-gloves and a furious look that is disquietingly hard to characterize further are in the same juxtaposition to the norm as his lifestyle. And where that comes out is in the protesting tone and lyrics of these bands’ music, whether they are high on life or on a mix of chemicals.

That means that you can, after all, be so much on the edge that you’re in the real centre, as there’s really an Einsteinian continuum that loops around on itself (not any sort of discworld). Saying that may, itself, seem literally eccentric (in its true sense of ‘out of the centre’), but I do believe that it’s just as much relevant to punk as to art and anti-art under the Dadaists or Surrealists: the essence of punk is not far from those origins in the post-war time of 1918 on, with the linking theme being not satisfied with the world as it is, and, more importantly, dissatisfied with everyone else for putting up with it.

After all, if it wasn’t André Bretton, poet and unchallenged spokesman of Surrealism, who said that the true surreal act is to take a loaded gun and go out into the street, shooting at random, it’s thereabouts. In that statement, there’s very much the feel of Lee, the lead-singer of one of the three bands with whom Shaun came into close contact - self-destructive and chaotic though he is, and despite what Lee puts into his body and ‘helps’ others to put into theirs whilst seeking to live as a skinhead in China, he’s obviously really just a pussy-cat. (After all, even cats fight, scrap, but eventually sleep.)

What matters most, though, about this film is not the bands’ lifestyles, or Shaun the worse for wear, or his often indisposed camera-man, but the music, which is so much in the punk idiom that one wonders that it was first caught so fully by trawling the Internet. For example, the drummer of Hedgehog is compelling in her playing, and though justly described as hitting really hard, is so truly in punk fashion.

Unlike the explosion of punk in the UK and US, though, there is no one to latch on, making money out of bondage-trousers or whatever, and, as far as I could see, no other media manipulators in the mode of those behind the Pistols would have scope for
doing that in China. The excellent music is what counts, and, despite underground sales of recordings, there’s no hope of a wider home audience.

Thanks for showing us, Shaun - if they want, maybe those bands can find unleashed fans elsewhere...


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