Fucking Amal

A beautiful film with a beautiful girl, and I don't mean the pretty one. But I'm not sure hitchhiking to Stockholm is the best solution to small town Scandinavian gender confusion.

From the awkward dialogue to the hours and hours spent in self-pity listening to. . . Albinoni? Jeez, Swedes are cultured. How many 14 year old Americans preparing to cut their wrists would select a baroque adagio to set the mood? Anyway, this movie gets everything right, even the little bits of drab, adolescent disinterest. Kids at that age at just conscious enough to believe themselves autonomous and coherent, but not conscious enough to say or do anything freely or coherently. In fact, and I remember this from personal experience, much of what passes as information between teens consists of oblique monosyllables or emotive paralanguage a la Herder and Rousseau. It takes guts and skill to base a movie's entire script on such aphasia.

The penultimate scene strays a bit close to superhero, until, that is, you realize that the final scene shows via chocolate milk and giggles just how little these girls have in common except their age and their mutual dependence, and that Agnes will live her fantasy for all of about a week, until bemused but mercurial Elin tires of this new exhibitionary game. Counterpointing the disconsolate Johan with the giddy Agnes is a deft touch and nicely implies that Elin's more recent acquisition will likely too be discarded and undone once Elin finds another word to articulate her unhappiness. First it was promiscuity, then it was lesbian. Soon it will be something else. We all know this. Johan definitely knows it. But Agnes, poor Agnes, as we see her in the final frames, so poignantly, for the first time in the film, relaxed and young, really young, doesn't know anything. All she can understand now is the total and self-consuming bliss of an affection so long pursued finally being reciprocated.

And what is with our country, that we had to change the perfectly suitable title to the deflated, gameshowy substitute: "Show me Love"? Anybody interested in watching a movie about underage Swedish lesbians, I wager, already feels comfortable with bad language.