Review: One Night Only
We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson, Sweden, 2013, 102 min)
MMoCA Spotlight Cinema, 227 State Street, Wednesday, October 1, 7:00pm»
I admire Lukas Moodysson’s new film We Are the Best! for what it doesn’t do as much as for what it does. As Moodysson tells the story of three thirteen-year-old Stockholm girls who form their own punk band in 1982, he understands that there is plenty of drama and humor in the basic premise. No need for extensive 80s pop culture and ironic fashion references (there’s only one pastel costumed talent show dance to Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”). No need to add extensive practice montages to show unrealistic improvement as a band (even at the end, they’re just okay, with only one song). No need to introduce a contest that they must win to prove themselves (they miss the deadline for the school talent show, and the climax of the film is just a gig at a youth center, not a contest). Instead, Moodysson focuses on the three girls themselves, Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), Klara (Mira Grosin) and Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) and never suggests that the band is more important than their friendship. The result is an extremely entertaining film about their discovery that feeling like an outcast can be a source of strength when you’re with the right outcasts.
Moodysson is very good at telling stories about young girls who are dissatisfied with their life and do something about it, starting with his Show Me Love (1998, also known by its much better original title, Fucking Åmål). Rather than a grand call to action, Bobo and Klara’s decision to form a band emerges organically from their attempts to deal with the jerks in their lives. Young members of the rock band Iron Fist insult and mock Bobo and Klara at the youth center before playing obnoxiously loud in a rehearsal room. Part for revenge and part out of boredom, they sign up for the next hour in the rehearsal room to get Iron Fist kicked out. But they have to pretend to be a band for their ruse to work, so Klara picks up a base and Bobo gets behind the drums. Making noise quickly leads to writing lyrics about how much they hate sports after they are punished for not participating in gym class. Soon they have a song, and they can make noise, so they are a band. What’s refreshing and liberating about the film is that it is completely irrelevant whether or not they succeed as a band, what is important is their agency in making their lives better through the band.
If there’s one forgivable cinematic sin in We Are the Best! it is that the girls are occasionally a bit more sophisticated and articulate than thirteen-year-olds are outside of the movies (here I’m drawing on my current employment working with kids up to 12, and my nieces and nephews). But this is forgivable because at other times they are genuinely ignorant and eager to learn. Klara, for example, very plausibly doesn’t seem to understand basic music terms and concepts. And the film captures very vividly Bobo and Klara’s drive to find out what’s going on in music through magazine articles. Here’s where the 1980s setting comes into play: no internet, no cell phones, no texting. Bobo pours through magazines for details about bands and musicians and talks to Klara on the phone in her room (you know, where the cord is attached to the wall). In addition to conveying a DIY punk spirit, Moodysson also captures a time-honored but now unfortunately dated form of music fandom.
Another reason that one sin is forgivable is that Barkhammar, Grosin, and LeMoyne are such engaging performers that you really can’t fault Moodysson for occasionally turning them into mini-adults. The trio handle their scenes of tween-melodrama as well as they handle their scenes of giddy girl giggling. Barkhammar, in particular, gives Bobo a quiet, contemplative exterior with a tense anxiousness under the surface. Grosin provides just the right amount of hubris to Klara, who dominates the group despite not knowing as much as she thinks she does. I only wish there were more opportunities for LeMoyne to flesh out Hedvig’s significant transformation from a subdued classical guitarist to cussing and yelling on stage; it is Hedvig, in fact, who first yells “VI ÄR BÄST!” out to their hostile debut audience. All three actresses are perfect in the final scene in the bus ride home after the gig, simultaneously defiant, silly, playful, and empowered.
We Are the Best! will play only once on the big screen in Madison, at Spotlight Cinema at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Wednesday, October 1 at 7:00 pm. We’ve chosen it as our Madfilm Meetup this week, so please join us and I’m confident you’ll be glad you did. If you can’t make it, put it in your GoWatchIt queue and get updates when the film is available on streaming services (it is already out on DVD and Blu-ray).
