Movie Review: Armand

 

Michael's Movie Grade: B

A flawed but engaging drama from Norway. 

This movie has a very intriguing premise. It is about a meeting between school personnel and parents after one elementary school student is said to have sexually assaulted another. Yet it soon becomes obvious that there is something not right with this story. This story is simply a great and well written one that is immediately engaging. I became immediately invested and wanted to find out what the real truth was. The more information this film gives us, the more invested I became. The twists and turns in this story were smart and believable. All of this was of course helped by a great cast lead by Renate Reinsve, best known for her wonderful performance in The Worst Person in the World (2021). Her performance here is equally as great if not better. She brings a real humanity to this story that makes it hard not to care about her character. 

Where this movie doesn't work as well is the surreal direction it takes at time. This movie tries to show the emotional state of our main character with surreal imagery, bizarre dance scenes and distortion of the soundtrack. Honestly this does not work at all. Such stylistic experiments should enhance the story and characters instead of distracting from them. This is not the case here. These scenes are poorly handled, often coming off as pretentious and heavy handed. They add nothing to the story and tell us nothing about the characters that we couldn't figure out from the more straightforward scenes. While this is still a very good movie, these scenes keep it from being the masterpiece it should have been. 

This marks the feature film debut for director/writer Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel. Tøndel is the grandson of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (one of my all-time favorite filmmakers) and the brilliant actress Liv Ullman. While this may not reach the heights of the best films from his grandparents it is still a good movie that is hopefully the start of a promising career. 

Movie Review: The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske)

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A+

An absolute masterpiece. 

Though this movie is advertised as a romance, there is actually a lot more to the film than that. As well as a romance this film is a wonderful character study and a very intelligent commentary on our culture today. Even though this film is from Norway this commentary will speak to anyone, whatever country they live in. That is because these themes are universal and, in some ways, timeless but still completely of today. As a woman in her late 20's and early 30's (she starts the movie as 29 and ends it as 30), our main character feels like she should have her life in order or at least heading in some sort of direction. But as someone without a clear mapped out plan for her life or any huge accomplishments, she feels like she is a failure and that she is not as much of an adult as she wants to be. This is something clear and relatable to nearly everyone watching this film. We live in a society that for better or worse clearly states that you always have to be working towards some goal and that by a certain age, you should have already figured that out. Just think of how many times you have been asked a question resembling, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" (only the wording changes when you do grow up). Yet the truth is most of us don't always have a clear path and feel inferior because of it. At one point a character says to our main character that he wants her to see just how wonderful she is, and we want the exact same thing for her. Despite this movie focusing on her romantic relationships, the person she truly struggles to love is herself and that is where much of the best drama stems from. This is not to say these romantic scenes don't shine though. The movie mostly focuses on two of her romantic relationships and these are both excellently handled. Not only do she have a charming chemistry with both of these men, but there is depth behind these relationships, that make them far from the one-note type of romances we are used to seeing in countless romantic comedies. There are multiple little subtle facets behind these relationships just as there are in any relationship between two people. This can lead to some very effective tearjerker moments. In fact this may be the most I teared up in a movie theater in quite a while.

Now all that I have written so far may make this film sound pretentious and overly serious, but neither could be further from the truth. Even with all this going on the movie is in many ways a comedy and it is a really funny one. The comedy can range from sophisticated to childish or from insightful to slapstick. Regardless of the type of comedy used, it is all very funny. I laughed out loud watching this many more times than I thought I would and I could definitely hear those in the theater with me laughing too. Yet (with the possible exception of a scene involving drug hallucinations) all of this comedy moved the story forward beautifully. 

This is a must see.