Things wound up in Gothenburg with a bang— the awarding of the Dragon Award, a cash prize for the best of eight Nordic films entered in the competition in a closing ceremony at the Clarion Hotel Post (just renovated in the hip W style across from the central train station) that felt more like Bette Midler at the Continental Baths circa 1974 than it did the ho-hum attempts at grandeur usually reserved for these things.
The cash prize--1, 000,000 Krona, or about $150,000—one of the largest anywhere, went to Kompani Orheim (Orheim Company), directed by Arild Andresen, the third installment in a trilogy about its hero, Jarle Klepp, your basic depressed Norwegian victim of family incivility, who came up during the 1980s and is now reflecting upon the emotional fjords of the journey. Of course, like many another household since the invention of mead, Jarle’s father is an alcoholic, so we endure with Jarle a well documented, nicely crafted, if pretty straightforward child’s eye view of the hazards of the raging Norwegian alcoholic father who eventually undoes them all almost completely. We have been this way before.
A close second, and which apparently caused a split in jury sentiments, was the Swedish film, She Male Snails (Pojktanten), by Ester Martin Bergsmark, a film that like its director is a category buster. Tall, angular, and strawberry blonde, Bergsmark has the face of a Swedish Viking starved to 140 lbs, with shaved head except for a long honey-colored ponytail. The fist sighting of Bergsmark was toward the end of the festival at the Riverton Hotel, the festival headquarters, where he/she floated out of the elevator one morning and across the breakfast room toward the eggs and sausages wearing something of a wrap over skinny jeans—in short, a collision of allegiances, affectations and appetites.
And that’s what the film is about, albeit Bergsmark is something of a meta-character to him or herself, standing outside, watching and commenting, or more exactly giggling, when not staring off in wet despair all through what might loosely be described as the recurring “documentary” sequence of the film in which he/she sits with his guy-girl soulmate, Eli, in a bathtub, their long angular legs draped over the sides. The film moves in and out of how they got to the tub, the back story of two lonely adolescent boys struggling with their inner queens in a Stieg Larsson world, snails who could lose their shells and move on, only to discover that inside the abandoned shell is a dead snail. The Norse gods are agog and otherwise occupied. The new journey is across the gender frontier of what is known into the unknown, no longer undertaken by men of wild hearts wearing fur ripped off the sides of elk. It has given way to two boys of confused bravery in a tub, no rub-a-dub-dub. Just exhaling perplexity.
She Male Snails was by the underground consensus of critics and film professionals onhand the freshest thing at the festival, with unclear prospects in the commercial world but a good chance for a world festival tour. Some part of the jury felt this way, too, which was acknowledged by Austrian director Jessica Hausner, who admitted after being sweated by the evening’s nightclub host that she and one other jury member were dragooned into bestowing the top Dragon award on Company Orheim. The jury got permission from the festival to declare a minority dissent, giving an honorary prize to She Male Snails, and essentially an artistic victory that missed out on the big money payout.
Bergsmark and Eli, his co-star in this chaotic film memoir, had already been to the podium twice to accept the Kodak cinematography award for what is a rather saturated lyrical style of filming, and to accept the Audience Award. Gothenburg’s audiences are older, and at the screening I attended at the Draken, there were plenty of walkouts, thus winning the Miss Popularity prize is no mean feat.
Needing almost no egging on from the evening’s hostess, Shimi Niavarani--something of a category buster herself as a dyed blonde, pint-sized, Iranian-Swedish cabaret singer decked out in a red ball gown and high heels and channeling Bette Midler, Sophie Tucker and Miss Piggy—Ester and Eli eschewed the usual thank you speech, since it largely seemed beyond them. They instead went into a somewhat private rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” which somehow morphed into “Moon Over Alabama.” The cabaret style thank you number never exactly seemed to end but mostly carried across all three trips to the podium all night, with time outs for other less gonzo filmmakers to thank their producers and their mothers. Honestly by the end of the Dragon Awards, whereby the evening expanded and the award lost a syllable, I was no longer certain who did what to whom exactly when. I don’t think I’ve ever been as entertained, however, by the complete mishmash of the suspect art form of an awards show. This was pretty much the received opinion on the spot of other invited guests, though my Swedish hosts were dying inside, it should be noted.
I could go on about the evening’s emcee and hostess, Shimi Niavarani. How she greeted the good priest on the jury who handed out the Church of Sweden Award to a film titled Flicker for depicting “the warmth of the human comedy,” by shaking her boobs in his face and saying “I know you want to bury your face in my tits,” and shouting out her room number (“I love you! I’m in 4-10…”) real sing-songy to the cleric as he receded into the weeds. How… oh forget it, that was a special moment and need not be sullied here by other imperfect memories of Niavarani’s casual obscenities, fuck-yous, and the usual barroom political analyses of super power politics by crack brained chanteuses. The priest came and would come again. Me too. Enough said.
I’m too busy still laughing to process any more awards for what was an earnest crop of well-made films. You’re on your own, so hit this link: http://www.anpdm.com/newsletterweb/46445A407742455146794743/41425E4A71434B5B407449455F43
However, should you think I am not capable of my own category busting, that very afternoon, after a visit to Gothenburg’s rather delightful art museum, I stopped in for lunch to see my young friend Johan at Restaurant Gabriel. I stared at the menu. Nothing was quite the way I wanted it. So I made up my own lunch from the various items: fried plaice, please, on open-faced dark sweet bread with vinaigrette greens on top and a beer. Major good. The least you can do, Johan, is name the sandwich the Jacobson, after a great Swedish category-busting explorer.
