The worst person in the world took a lot of heat for being an overprotective mom in Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s “can’t look away” film.
There is one very good scene in “Armand,” which is written and directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, who is the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. We’re inside a Norwegian grade school. Elisabeth, mother to one of the students, has been called into the school to be confronted by a panel of teachers. She is told, piece by piece, that her 6 year old son Armand whom we never see, or any other child for that matter; it’s a strange omission since the movie is about kids may have sexually abused one of his classmates. Elisabeth knows her well-adjusted son can’t be guilty in any predatory way because he’s only 6 years old. So she fixes her interrogators with a skeptical glare. Then she starts to laugh and can’t stop.
Played by Renate Reinsve (who gained wider fame for her work in Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World”), Elisabeth laughs through about five minutes of screen time during this bravura performance. She keeps halting and then starting up again as if it were bursting out of her uncontrollably from someplace deep down inside herself. I started thinking that laughing must be harder than crying for actors: How do you make it seem spontaneous? For minutes on end?
But where Reinsve’s power lies isn’t why she starts laughing so much as where it comes from. It’s laughter that tastes bitter and almost sarcastic while carrying an undercurrent of wait a minute are you kidding me? She is not just laughing at how dumb those questions are beneath her, she’s laughing at this whole idea that we live here, in this society that’s decided to exercise this kind of control over conduct. Her laughter doesn’t stop there. Again and again these revelations these ghastly realizations keep finding their way deeper inside her as they come crashing down upon one another in waves during what should have been momentary outbursts of giggles. Reinsve, who doesn’t have a famous filmmaking lineage like the director does(NN), made me think of Liv Ullmann when I watched what she did here.
The rest of the movie made me think about how coherence might not be such an important thing anymore when it comes to stories or themes or visions or whatever else.
“Armand” starts off with an interesting idea (a parent gets interrogated about their child’s actions so we can explore different social norms). But beyond being shot beautifully, it just falls apart after that point. It keeps throwing things obliquely and randomly your way and the pieces don’t fit together because there is no solution to this puzzle. Egghead cinema got its 20th-century spokesman in Ingmar Bergman, yet he could write dialogue that would pull you in like a drainpipe with all his grandiosity; whereas Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel has conversations so laconic and elliptical they sound like multitasking-written late-period David Mamet spouted by someone else altogether.
Ullmann Tøndel is not familiar with how to go through a scene. Over and over, he abandons us, and most of what occurs is completely unbelievable. Why does the panel questioning Elisabeth in a classroom instead of an office? If they know that something terrible might have taken place, why don’t they just tell her what she’s been accused of instead of dancing around it for 45 minutes? The person running the panel is an inexperienced young teacher, Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), who is out of her depth. But if one of the film’s main points is that Norwegian society has gone mad with caution then wouldn’t they put someone else in charge? As more comes to light about the incident, it turns out that Armand’s accuser, a 6-year-old named Jon, says he was raped. But as Elisabeth points out, this seems like highly unlikely behavior or language for a 6 year old.
Ullmann Tøndel doesn’t stop there; he piles connections and layers of trauma onto his characters. Elisabeth and Sarah Jon’s mother are sisters-in-law. (Although we aren’t told this for quite some time.) Thomas the man who connects them was Sarah’s brother and Elisabeth’s husband, he killed himself. (Sarah blames Elisabeth.) It is frustrating how much talk there is about people we never meet. And those old photographs of several of them from when they were students at the school that are displayed in the hallway give parts of the movie a spooky but weirdly gratuitous “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” vibe. Even a recurring bloody nose is made to seem sinister. And then late in the film there are a couple showpiece sequences that abandon dialogue: a sinewy dance performed by Elisabeth, and an expressionistic group body grope. Why these scenes are here, I don’t know.
Ullmann Tøndel shoots the school in such a way that it takes on a sinister sheen the hallways become a maze and we hang in there, hoping we can figure out what’s going on. I could go on about “Armand’s” pesky contrivances, but instead I’ll ask a question that critics perhaps don’t ask often enough: Who is this movie for? Who is watching it? Who, outside of a film festival, is clamoring to cut through its thicket of incoherence? Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel has some talent (he staged that laughing-jag scene), but if Ingmar Bergman were looking down from art-house heaven.
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