ragna jorming – filmcentric

At one level this is a Swedish coming of age film, with intolerant school bullies picking on young women, who look to each other for love and support. However, it quickly becomes evident that one of them, Kim (Tuva Jagell), feels uncomfortable with her gender identity, while Momo (Louise Nyvall) has feelings for Kim. Via a fantasy expedient of a magical plant, the film allows the young women to transform Cinderella-like into men for a night, thereby experiencing facets of privilege and masculinist behaviour, in their interactions with a group of rebellious boys who go to their school. It’s actually done really well, at least from my admittedly gender-normative point of view. There’s a delicate artistry to the transformation sequences and it makes tangible, via its magical premise, some of the identity fluidity that’s (I think) natural when you’re growing up.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Alexandra-Therese Keining (based on the novel by Jessica Schiefauer); Cinematographer Ragna Jorming; Starring Tuva Jagell, Louise Nyvall, Wilma Holmén; Length 106 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Thursday 10 November 2016.

At a certain level The Reunion poses itself as a documentary about artist (and director/writer/star) Anna Odell confronting her high school experience after 20 years, but it’s never clear to what extent any of this is true or accurate, preferring to stay aloof from such quotidian issues. It poses questions about our relationship to our own past and how we deal with emotional traumas over time, via a two-part meta-fictional framework. In the first part, Odell stages an account of a class reunion in which she arrives and disrupts the nostalgic hazy view the others have of their youthful camaraderie, in a style reminiscent of the awkward puncturing of complacent bourgeois values in Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen. The second, longer, part has her then confront the ‘real’ former classmates who were at the reunion to which she was not, in fact, invited. The film is stylistically of a piece for its entire running length, and the shot-reverse shot stagings of her interviews and awkward street encounters with her school colleagues (including one in which an actor who played a role in the first part is approached by the ‘real’ person the character was based upon) certainly distance it from straightforward documentation. It makes for an odd fictional exercise, in which the perpetually deer-in-the-headlights expression of Anna dominates and the audience is challenged to put themselves in her place, and in those of her classmates.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Anna Odell; Cinematographer Ragna Jorming; Starring Anna Odell; Length 88 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Saturday 11 July 2015.