A film by Dag Johan Haugerud
With: Ella Øverbye, Selome Emnetu, Anne Marit Jacobsen, Ane Dahl Torp, Andrine Sæther, Silje Breivik, Lars Jacob Holm, Valdemar Dørmænen Irgens, Brynjar Åbel Bandlien, Nadia Bonnevie
A seventeen-year-old girl experiences a sexual awakening when she falls head over heels in love with her female teacher. She writes this down in her diary, and writes so well, vividly and recognizably that both mother and grandmother think the book should be published. Without taking into account that the girl has only written it to keep the crush alive for herself.
Our rate: (*)
It’s a story that’s quickly bombastic, and heavily cluttered by a voice-over that’s so bad it makes some filmmakers say that voice-overs are the antithesis of cinema, because they don’t appeal to the viewer’s intelligence and are a sign of lazy directing. What’s more, the limpid narrative, though it may present a few moments of accuracy, stretches on for no particular reason, without subtlety or flashes of brilliance, and its only remarkable quality is its willingness to go around an issue, 365 degrees style. As for the rest, the question the film poses under its deceptively psychological guise (oh, how far Bergman has come!) – love, fascination and the passage to adulthood through the determination of a nascent sexuality (and desires) – is reminiscent of other films in the selection (The Tower of Ice, for example). Annoyingly, the film goes astray in its attempt to sound modern, by summoning up societal themes and setting them up as the main subject, delivering a vision so self-centered, so self-enclosing that it seems blind to everything that cinema could gain from saying about our times, and astonishingly, the film already seems old-fashioned in its attempt to bring a societal subject to the screen in a watered-down, normalizing way, normalizing, forgetting to evoke all the conservatism, all the violence, all the hatreds today that are rising to the surface, and also adopting a bourgeois point of view, one that consists in considering that success in life (a young girl here is writing a book that will be easily published) is achieved without any obstacles.