The Lukas Moodysson Collection (1998-2013)(Review)

The test of a good box set is not so much the quality of each individual film, but whether it gives you new contexts to appreciate the films you may not otherwise take to. Arrow’s new Blu-Ray set of every fiction feature directed by Lukas Moodysson deserves points for completeness, and for allowing audiences the chance to see some films that have been maddeningly hard to get hold of since their original Region 2 releases. But it also deserves praise for complicating the standard view of Moodysson as a director who lost his way somewhere in between his early films and 2013’s wonderful return to comedy, We are the Best!

The sense that We are the Best! takes Moodysson’s career came full circle probably arose because it makes such an irresistible double-bill with his debut, 1998’s Fucking Åmål. Released in more timid markets as Show Me Love after the Robyn track that plays over the closing credits, it’s every bit as great a portrait of adolescence. To Moodysson, the teenage years are a farce that feels like a tragedy, and although Fucking Åmål has some moments that are darker than anything in We are the Best! – self-harm, homophobia and disability discrimination are present – it’s ultimately a joyful film. The building blocks of the story are familiar, yet every detail, every observation, rings true – and there’s room for a nice cliche-inverting gag as Elin’s attempt to get her beloved Agnes’s attention by throwing stones at her bedroom window results in an almighty smash. It is, as Elin says in one of the film’s most iconic moments, “so fucking cool”.

It’s a testament to how good Fucking Åmål is that it still feels special nowadays, when there are a few more LGBTQ+ teen films to compete with. Back in the late ’90s there were almost none, and his follow-up Together struck an even more unexpected note. A comedy-drama set in a Marxist commune in the 1970s, it was praised on its release for its evocation of the absurdity of the decade. What that meant, to turn-of-the-millennium audiences, was not just embarrassing fashions and Abba songs, but earnest political discussion. Watching Together in a more polarised age, it’s hard not to feel like some of the novelty has been removed from the characters’ debates on class dynamics and political lesbianism. Yet Moodysson’s character work is as solid as ever, and it provides more evidence that he’s one of cinema’s great directors of children. Moodysson is reportedly planning a sequel, Together ’99, that charts his characters’ adventures in the beige end-of-history era that the original film was released in: a wonderfully mischievous idea.

Having established himself in just two films as Sweden’s most acclaimed director since Bergman – who was a vocal fan of Fucking Åmål – Moodysson threw the first of his curveballs. Lilya 4-Ever is another tale of teenage girlhood, but it couldn’t be further from his other films on the subject. Inspired by a true story, it’s the harrowing tale of a Russian girl trafficked to Sweden and forced into prostitution. The film still rings horribly true, not least because of the conviction of Oksana Akinshina’s performance in the title role. Yet it isn’t single-mindedly bleak. When Lilya and her friend use drugs to escape their misery, he allows them a flash of wide-angle, trance-soundtracked euphoria, and Lilya’s fantasies of a dead friend returning as an angel is modest and touching where it could easily have been kitsch.

Moodysson’s teen comedies are one of a kind; his dramas invite more comparisons, although they’re comparisons that tend to favour Moodysson. Certainly, any partisans of Blonde wondering why that film’s portrayal of gendered abuse was criticised for being prurient would be well-advised to check out how Moodysson handles similar scenes here. The way in which Moodysson removes anything potentially erotic from the sex scenes – focusing instead on Lilya’s tense, pained expressions, or the tiny details of her clients she focuses on in order to dissociate during another brutal paid encounter – bears comparison to what his countrywoman Ninja Thyberg achieved in her recent porn-industry drama Pleasure. Overall, it’s the most heartfelt, methodical and believable portrait of an individual being ground down by society since Alan Clarke died.

These are not the comparison points that Moodysson’s second film about the sex industry evoke. A Hole in My Heart, in which the shooting of an amateur porn film is watched by the director’s teenage Goth son, is more akin to Salo, La Grande Bouffe and several banned-in-the-UK horror films that I suspect will get me put on a government watchlist if I cite them here. It received the first really brutal backlash of Moodysson’s career, and it’s not hard to see why. Lilya 4-Ever is hard to watch because it’s so emotionally wrenching; A Hole in My Heart is hard to watch because Moodysson keeps including audio flash cuts of deafening noise, introducing digital distortion into otherwise naturalistic scenes, or returning to close-ups of real-life labiaplasty surgery.

There’s never been anything exactly like A Hole in My Heart, though film festivals throughout the 2000s saw a steady stream of films that were superficially like it: gruelling arthouse ordeal films that wanted you to assess their intellectual bona fides purely based on how long the gang-rape scene was. Removed from that context and placed in the middle of Moodysson’s career, it’s surprising how much of the director’s characteristic humanity is still detectable. Even Geko, the brutish porn performer hired to dish out the film’s most awful humiliations, is the subject of Moodysson’s empathetic curiosity: during a sex scene, his internal monologue repeats “I’m not here, I’m somewhere else, I have an illness” and he fantasises – unexpectedly but charmingly – about escaping and running through a crop circle. It’s not a film that even its partisans will care to rewatch, but Moodysson is very interested in finding out why his antagonists hurt people, rather than just displaying the sadism or forcing it into a strained political metaphor as many of his peers did.

There is enough reason to call A Hole in My Heart misunderstood, not least because Moodysson described it as a film about reality TV, rather than porn. The celebrity-culture preoccupations recur in Container, his second experimental film, whose narrator obsesses over idols ranging from Kylie Minogue to the tragic porn star Savannah. The narrator is female, but her onscreen avatar is male, and the film works very well as a trans allegory. It quickly becomes one-paced, devoid of even the simple build-then-explode structure of A Hole in My Heart, and its origins as video art are all too clear. It’s still much more distinctive than 2009’s Mammoth, a late stab at the we-are-all-connected-by-overdetermined-metaphors school of drama that brought us Crash and Babel. Unlike Lilya 4-Ever, the moments of charm and grace are too clearly intended to Mean Something, and none of the plot resolutions will surprise anyone who’s seen a film like this before. Its overall thesis – that the West’s dependence on cheap foreign labour is colonialism by any other name – is sound, but this is easily the most anonymous of Moodysson’s films.

And then there’s We are the Best!, which lives up to its title, beating off competition from Fucking Åmål and Lilya 4-Ever to be quite possibly the best thing here. The story of a group of tween girls in 1980s Sweden who form a punk band, it’s completely upfront about its heroines’ lack of artistic commitment and basic talent, and you’ll be cheering them on anyway. There is a very funny supporting role from the chameleonic David Dencik as an embarrassing dad, but the film belongs to its trio of indelibly great young stars: Mira Barkhammer, Liv LeMoyne and Mira Grosin. There’s a brief reminder of Together in the scene where the kids disastrously experiment with alcohol, and the parent-child relationships hark back to Fucking Åmål, but mostly this is the work of a man who’s spent four films confronting the absolute darkest corners of modern civilisation and come out of it more determined to have fun than ever. One of the most infallible feel-good movies I know of, and it needs to be more widely seen.

The main extra is a career-spanning interview with Lukas Moodysson, conducted by Sarah Lutton and spread across all six discs (A Hole in My Heart and Container are on the same disc). Any readers who think this review was a little contrarian should check out Moodysson’s thoughts on his own films, whether it’s criticising Lilya 4-Ever for being too much of an issue movie or claiming A Hole in My Heart is partly a comedy. Lutton also conducts interviews with key cast and crew members for each film, there are featurettes contextualising Fucking Åmål and We are the Best! in the history of queer cinema and Swedish punk respectively, and Moodysson’s blackly comic early short Talk is on the first disc. Furthering the sense that this box set is designed, in part, to drive a reassessment of Moodysson’s problem works, two of the most interesting extras are included in support of Container and A Hole in My Heart. Inside the Container Crypt sees a psychiatrist, a psychic and a priest asked for their thoughts on the film, while A Hole in My Second Heart is a revealing behind-the-scenes clip where Moodysson wards off a mutiny from his male leads. His female lead, Sanna Bråding, seems to find the whole thing funny, which – after watching what happens to her in the film – is a huge relief.

Graham’s Archive – The Lukas Moodysson Collection