Rural Route: That Special Summer

It turns out precocious kids are just as annoying in Swedish and Finnish, as in English. This does not necessarily have to be the case. Bázo, screening tomorrow at Scandinavia House, features strong performances by Issath and Jussi Juakim Gaup as the newly orphaned Kevin. That Special Summer (Kid Svensk, Swedish trailer here), the concluding film in the Rural Route Film Festival’s Scandinavia House series, is not so fortunate.

Kirsi, nick-named Kid, is in fact a seriously mixed-up youth. Fluent in Swedish and comfortable in her Swedish environment, she has grown apart from her Finnish mother Ester after her father’s untimely death. Of course, some bonding during a week’s vacation in the Finnish countryside will surely fix everything.

Traveling with Ester’s tarty best friend Sirkka and her metal-head son Jamppe, Kid’s disposition does not improve. Their picturesque plans for the trip involve opening an impromptu restaurant to cater to the motor rally that will pass right by their summer house. Ester also hopes to rekindle romance with her old flame, Sirkka’s brother Markku. In fact, she is seriously considering staying in Finland, a decision which would not thrill Kid. Happily though, all their deep-seated emotional problems are nicely resolved within the five day trip.

Summer is a mostly harmless coming of age tale, except for the constant sexual tension between the teenaged minors, which just gets a little creepy. However, it is also a little light on consequences for Kid’s constant acting out, notably including some reasonably significant larceny. It is what it is.

Bázo in contrast, is both more substantial and ultimately more rewarding. Very respectable child actors, the Gaup twins are among several young actors who contributed strong performances to films in the rural Scandinavian series. Sara Langebæk Gaarmann and Lucas Munk Billing were quite credible as the young leads in the Danish adventure-special effects film Island of Lost Souls. Particularly impressive were Hera Hilmarsdottir and Jörundur Ragnarsson as the truly troubled teens of Quiet Storm.

In comparison to the previous films in the series, Summer is a bit slight. Over all though, it was a strong slate of films. Again, one of the strongest, Bázo, screens tomorrow, while Summer screens this Saturday.

Rural Route: Bazo

The Sami—don’t call them Laplanders—are well assimilated in Northern Europe, but remain stereotyped for their traditional reindeer-herding livelihood. It turns out they also have an unexpected talent for revenge in Bázo, a Norwegian production largely set in Sweden, screening Wednesday at Scandinavia House, in conjunction with the Rural Route Film Festival.

Bázo is a Sami expression for the mentally slow. It is not exactly an affectionate nickname, but Emil is stuck with it. Even his brother Kenneth uses it, but he is not much of a brother, only occasionally visiting Emil and their father to show off his new Mercedes and girlfriend, pretty much in that order. Still, when Kenneth dies under mysterious circumstances, the not as dumb as he looks Emil sets out to do right by his brother. Dismissed as borderline retarded, Emil may have little formal schooling, but he fully understands concepts like honor and compassion.

Travelling down to the big city, Emil discovers some unsavory underworld characters have claimed much of his brother’s property. He is able to take possession of the Mercedes, a shotgun, and Kevin, the nephew Emil never knew he had. At least, the shotgun and the car will come in handy.

Emil is not the hulking tough guy his size and reticence might suggest. Frankly, he just takes one beating after another. Though not a fighter, he might just make a decent surrogate father, if he is allowed to keep Kevin, and is not killed by henchmen working for the mobbed-up councilman behind his brother’s death.

Bázo is not a revenge movie in the style of Get Carter. Strictly speaking, it is a character study of the shy Emil, played by Sverre Porsanger in a powerful but understated performance. Still, when the so-called “Bázo” starts taking care of business, it is reasonably satisfying. More than just some entertaining payback, Bázo has some beautifully acted little moments. For instance, Ebba Joks makes a strong impression in the small role of Irene, a sympathetic waitress, who shelters the stranded Emil and Kevin one night. In a memorable scene, she and Emil drink beer while sitting in the dark, on her kitchen floor (beneath the windows), as her abusive ex-husband pounds on the front-door screaming threats at her. It representative of what the film is about: under-dogs living a twilight existence.

Directed with more sensitivity than flash by Lars-Göran Pettersson, Bázo still makes effective use of its desolate Northern Swedish locales. It is definitely a rural film, and probably the best of the Rural Route’s series at Scandinavia House. It screens this Wednesday at 6:30.

Rural Route: The Horseman

There is a reason Sweden has never been known as the world’s breadbasket. The land is rugged and the weather can be harsh. At least it is around Stig-Anders’ farm in the Scandinavian country’s rocky, forested Småland region. His is a hardscrabble life, but it holds a certain austerely poetic quality, as captured in Peter Gerdehag and Tell Johansson’s documentary, The Horseman (Hästmannen, trailer here), screening tomorrow at Scandinavia House, in conjunction with the Rural Route Film Festival.

A man of nature and tradition, Stig-Anders does things the hard way. Eschewing tractors because they compress the soil, he uses horses to work his fields, just as his father did before him. However, as the sole hand on his ramshackle farm, the taciturn farmer’s strength is starting to fail him. Attempting to save his livestock during a severe blizzard, Stig-Anders is hobbled with severe frostbite. With his way of life in doubt, Madelene, an old friend, steps in to help the demoralized horseman return to his farm. Although appearing fearsome and anti-social to outsiders, Stig-Anders is a gentle soul, who easily stirs the audience’s sympathy during his plight.

Horseman is a quiet, deliberate film. Gerdehag and Johansson’s camera lovingly lingers on Stig-Anders as he tills his fields and clears brush in the nearby woods. His isolated corner of the world is truly far-removed from the clamor of campaigns, media, blogging, and the rest of the noise from the hyperkinetic global culture. There is something quite engrossing about his ascetic life. How quickly you snap out of it after the screening depends on the degree to which a life of such simplicity enforced by nature’s capriciousness resonates within you.

Horseman is a discreet film that treats its subject with dignity and compassion, but it requires no small measure of patience as it slowly runs its course. However, there is probably no more fitting film for a festival dedicated to rural Scandinavia. It screens tomorrow and Saturday at Scandinavia House.

Rural Route: Island of Lost Souls

The Danish selection in the Rural Route Film Festival’s Scandinavia House film series might be the ringer of the program. Following her mother’s divorce, fourteen year-old Lulu suddenly finds herself in a community that might better be described as boring, rather than rural. Perhaps, for a budding young mystic, there is little distinction between the two. However, in Nikolaj Arcel’s Island of Lost Souls (partial trailer here), the nearby Monk Island proves the perfect desolate setting for an undead Necromancer to wage war against the forces of light.

In 1871, a lodge of mystics dedicated to fighting evil wages a pyrrhic battle against an evil Necromancer, thinking they have defeated him at great personal cost. Obviously, they haven’t killed him dead enough, just deferred the final battle to our time. Now the reconstituted Necromancer is wresting dead souls from their eternal rest, holding them captive on Monk Island. Each has a clue to the location of a page from the powerful Lodge Book which temporarily overpowered him some hundred years prior. However, Lulu’s Ouija board diverts one such lost soul, lodge member Herman Hartmann, who inadvertently takes possession of her annoying younger brother Sylvester.

Together with the help of Oliver, the awkward rich kid, and the questionable adult supervision of Ricard, a failed psychic researcher, they investigate the evil happenings on Monk Island. Amongst the scares they find there is an evil scarecrow, whose effects are surprisingly well done. Indeed, the production values of Island are quite strong throughout.

As Lulu and Sylvester/Hartmann, Sara Langebæk Gaarmann and Lucas Munk Billing both look age-appropriate, and Billing is reasonably credible when channeling the older character. Lars Mikkelsen is a creepy screen presence as the Necromancer. Unfortunately, the other adults are mostly stereotypes, including a mom straight out of John Hughes movies, who recognizes no behavioral changes when her son is possessed by a thirty-nine year-old from the nineteenth century.

In terms of tone, Island’s scenes of supernatural horror might be too intense for young viewers, but the early teenaged anxiety of Lulu and Oliver probably skews more towards that audience. If you were at Anime Fest this weekend, you should love it and normal film fest patrons could find it an interesting diversion, leading up to Halloween. Universal is developing a remake of Island, also to be helmed by Arcel, so in the future it could conceivably secure some sort of American distribution. For now, it screens at Scandinavia House this coming Wednesday and Saturday.

Rural Route: Quiet Storm

It can be pretty lonely up north. As the land of fields and fjords Scandinavia has its share of rustic countryside, which explains the programming collaboration between the Rural Route Film Festival and the Scandinavia House, presenting a series of films set in rural Scandinavia. Evidently, the American belief in the virtues of country living as an antidote for delinquency also had currency in Scandinavia, or at least the early 1970’s Iceland dramatized in Quiet Storm (Veðramót, Icelandic trailer here), the first film in the series, which screens this Wednesday.

At the Veðramót juvenile detention facility, the hippies are literally running the prison. Selma has run away from her respectable middle class home to join her boyfriend Blöffi as caretakers of a remote prison farm for highly disturbed teens. With paintings of Marx and Che on the wall, they oversee their charges with scrupulous respect for their self-esteem. Knowing nothing about their past, they encourage the teens to open up in their rap session group meetings. Do not bother rolling your eyes, because the kids do it for the audience.

Obviously things go bad, because the film is told as a flashback precipitated by a letter sent by Disa, one of the former Veðramót kids, now serving time for murdering her abusive step-father. Fishing for clemency, she writes to the middle-aged Selma (who returned to her bourgeois roots to become a judge), explaining what really happened during their fateful time on the farm.

Veðramót really is in the middle of nowhere. The vistas are impressive, but the isolation exacerbates Disa’s emotional problems. Although some of the troubled teens show initial progress in their new environment, she is a destabilizing influence in the house, determined to sabotage Selma and Blöffi’s relationship.

While far from a celebration of rural living, Storm makes effective use of its remote location, arrestingly filmed by cinematographer Svein Krovel. Surprisingly, the younger actors are the more convincing in the cast. Hera Hilmarsdottir is the stand out as the manipulative Disa and Jörundur Ragnarsson is just plain creepy as the highly disturbed young Sammi. However, Tinna Hrafnsdottir never looks right as Selma, appearing too young to be a magistrate and too old to be college drop-out.

Writer-director Guðný Halldórsdóttir displays little sentimental attachment for the era, dramatically illustrating the consequences when good intentions collide with reality. Never send a hippie to do Father Flanagan’s job seems to be the moral. Storm is a legitimately edgy film that could probably never get picked up by politically correct art-house distributors, so catching it at Scandinavia House is recommended. It screens this Wednesday and Saturday.