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)
