“This sucks!” So says one of the main characters of writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s latest, We Are The Best (which opens in the US on May 30). Diminutive, mohawked, 13-year-old Klara (Mira Grosin) is reacting to the live show in which she sees the worst of what middle school in early 1980s Stockholm has to offer: girls with long blonde hair in pastel leotards dancing stiffly to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Although Klara, like her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), listens to punk music, has short hair, and wears the mildly bohemian fashions of the time (scarves and oversized jackets those who were teenagers in that era will recognize), boisterous high-spirited Klara is no nihilist. She is the kind of young iconoclast who has been a mainstay in literature since Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (and even before, going back to Lazarillo de Tormes)–the kind girls and women in films (and even in literature) are rarely allowed to be. Klara and her friend Bobo–with their highly defined likes and dislikes in music–are also one of the only instances in film in which girls (and even women) are allowed to have taste in (and opinions about) something other than boys and clothes–without the filmmaker or screenwriter denigrating them or their opinions.
Like most 13-year-olds, Klara and Bobo spend their time outside of school trying to alleviate boredom: hanging out at the park or the recreation center, where they cringe at the heavy metal cacophony of teenage boys rehearsing. When the director tells them that whoever has signed up for the rehearsal space is allowed to play as loud as they want, Klara and Bobo see the band has neglected to sign up for their current rehearsal time, fill in their own names instead and succeed in kicking the boys out. For the rest of their allotted time they whale on the instruments the center provides (a bass and drums), shout into the microphones, and have a great time. Their “band” is born.
During the school show they see the reserved, tall, blonde Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) play classical guitar and instead of making fun of her, as they have in previous years, notice that she is talented. They need a guitarist for their band, so they invite her to join.
Hedvig, although conventionally beautiful (LeMoyne in oxford shirts, big sweaters, and hardly any makeup convincingly looks both like a shy teenager from the early 80s and a supermodel on her day off) has no friends at school, always eating lunch alone; the other students have deemed her an outsider because she is “Christian.” But when she accepts Bobo and Klara’s offer, the band of two outsiders becomes three, and they all happily share a lunch table from then on, nicely capturing the transition when teenagers see the value not just in the things but in the people they had previously dismissed as “weird.”
The girls throw their considerable energy into the band (and even play a gig at the end), with Hedvig teaching chords and time to the others, and Bobo and Klara composing anti-sports lyrics to a song when the gym teacher in school orders them to run laps. But we can see they’re still adolescents, in the way Klara and Bobo obsess over teenage boys in a punk band from the suburbs, or egg each other on when they decide to cut Hedvig’s hair (after which Hedvig’s mother lectures them in a surprisingly thoughtful way). The band becomes a cause and a solace to the girls, a way to get through the agony of middle school.
Although Klara’s main lament is that her parents and brothers are alternately boring and embarrassing, and she will never play as well as Hedvig, Bobo has a rougher time. She wears glasses and has cut her own hair into a short, unflattering style which, unlike Klara’s, never looks “edgy,” just awkward. The boys she likes never seem to like her back, and Bobo’s mother practices the type of sunny but apathetic parenting also featured in the contemporary-set Palo Alto. At a party in their apartment her mother points out Bobo’s homemade haircut to the guests, one of whom says, “It’s such a good cut on you,” a statement so patently untrue that it hurts Bobo more than an insult would. After a different night of humiliation, Bobo asks Klara to tell her one good thing and Klara answers, “You’re in the best band in the world,” another lie, but one that is infinitely more comforting to Bobo.
Moodysson also wrote and directed one of my favorite queer girl coming-of-age films Show Me Love (its original Swedish title translates as Fucking Amal) and the ensemble comedy about a commune in the 70s, Together. Klara’s parents and Bobo’s mom could be the characters from Together ten years later: they’ve outgrown the commune, but they still have the same struggles–Klara’s parents arguing about divvying up the housework and Bobo’s mother paying too much attention to her own problems and not enough to her child. The scenes in which Bobo and Klara get drunk from the dregs of cups from Klara’s brother’s party echoes scenes both in Together where the kids drink the wine the adults have left in their glasses, and in Show Me Love when Elin tries one pill from every bottle in her mother’s medicine cabinet to see if they make her “feel anything.”
We Are The Best isn’t quite as sharp or funny as those two previous films. It could use some queer characters: these short-haired, outcast girls in a band together all seeming to be completely straight doesn’t ring true (though Hedvig, even though she’s a year older, doesn’t seem as interested in boys as Klara and Bobo–hmmm). And because the girls are so close, I expected at least one of their harassing classmates to yell “dyke” at one or all of them, which never happens, even though, at that time, queer panic (even in liberal Sweden) was in full swing among adults and would undoubtedly be worse among adolescents. Also anyone who’s not Swedish (or hasn’t spent a lot of time in Sweden) who is expecting to hear familiar music from the 80s (except that Human League song) will be disappointed. Still, the film is delightful and, like Moodysson’s other films, has special insight into the lives of adolescent girls (it’s based on an autobiographical graphic novel by the director’s wife, Coco Moodysson, and features their own daughter in a small role). His touch with the young performers is expert: we never doubt the reality of these girls, their personalities (Grosin’s jaunty, smiling bravado is especially wonderful) or their friendship, all the more extraordinary considering that the actresses are the ages of the characters they play (Grosin was actually younger–11–during filming). Because of their commitment to the band, Klara and Bobo stop fighting about a boy (which could have ended their friendship) and, in the end, all three even earn the respect of the heavy metal band. The girls’ band might not be the best in the world, but it turns out to be the best thing in their world.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33H0ONZcSY”]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
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