Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love

Anna Westerstahl Stenport

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780295804217
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar--the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards--including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actresses. A coming-of-age and coming out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town, Show Me Love is widely considered a youth film classic and was called a "masterpiece" by Ingmar Bergman. This book, which is the first study of Moodysson in any language, includes discussions of the film's genre, aesthetics, and style, and situates the film in both contemporary Swedish cinema and broader Swedish culture. It includes sequence and dialogue analysis and discusses how and why this particular film became so important: its queer significance, its unusually realistic depiction of youth, and its critical reception. Anna Stenport conducted extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including several enlightening discussions with Moodysson himself. Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love offers an incisive introduction to Moodysson for readers interested in contemporary film, as well as a history and close analysis of changes in the Swedish film industry.

1

Moodysson's Contexts

In the mid-1990s, Lukas Moodysson (b. 1969) was best known, if at all, in his home country Sweden as an obscure poetic prodigy in the modernist tradition, having published his first collection of poems with a prestigious publisher at age seventeen. His breakthrough debut feature as director and scriptwriter, Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål, 1998), made him a household name overnight. This film was enthusiastically received in all major media outlets, seen by nearly 900,000 viewers in Sweden, and subsequently received four Guldbaggar—the Swedish equivalent of Oscars at the Academy Awards—including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actors (Alexandra Dahlström and Rebecca Liljeberg). In Sweden, Show Me Love was soon thereafter considered a youth film classic, while international reception saw it as related to the New Queer Cinema wave of the early 1990s.¹ This coming-of-age and coming-out film about two young women in a stiflingly oppressive small town indeed became a favorite at international gay and lesbian film festivals, though Swedish reception initially downplayed its queer elements. Show Me Love was selected as Sweden's film for the Academy Awards, won the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999, and was subsequently screened all over the world, at film festivals as well as in regular distribution.

Show Me Love, shot on a limited budget in small-town Trollhättan with largely amateur and young actors, was quickly recognized as a watershed mark in Swedish film history. Ingmar Bergman called Moodysson “a master” and Show Me Love “a masterpiece,” while distinguished film scholar Leif Furhammar labeled it as a film that ignited a “depressed” Swedish film industry of the mid-1990s with “hope and enthusiasm.”² Well-known film director Stefan Jarl later declared Moodysson “a genius,” and journalist Jannike Åhlund describes a perception of Moodysson at the time of Show Me Love's release as “Swedish film's savior.”³ International critics tend to relate Moodysson to his famous predecessor, positioning him as “the most celebrated Swedish film director after Ingmar Bergman.”⁴

Show Me Love's extraordinary success gave Moodysson a stable platform from which to subsequently experiment with a range of topics, approaches, styles, and cinematic forms. Moodysson has released five additional feature films: Together (Tillsammans, 2000); Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever, 2002); A Hole in My Heart (Ett hål i mitt hjärta, 2005); Container (2006); and Mammoth (Mammut, 2009). Having just finished Show Me Love, Moodysson also cowrote the script to an acclaimed television mini-series, The New Country (Det nya landet, 2000), with Peter Birro, subsequently released as a feature film with the same title. After Lilya 4-ever, he codirected a controversial documentary, The Kids They Sentenced (Terrorister: En film om dom dömda, 2003; with Stefan Jarl). Moodysson has also continued writing poetry and narrative prose,⁵ and has further made forays into experimental photography. Though divergent in scope, there is one unifying trope of his films: children and adolescents feature prominently, often as vehicles of critical perspicuity, affective connection, and audience identification. In Show Me Love, Elin and Agnes' teenage romance challenges social norms and foregrounds repressive aspects of conventional Swedish small-town life. In Together, 13-year-old Eva (Emma Samuelsson) declares her opinion that, as they are self-absorbed and careless, all “adults are idiots”; and in Container's art film inspired monologue, we sense that a small child has been trapped in an adult body. Moodysson has affirmed in numerous interviews that this is, indeed, a privileged perspective for him: “I think I am trying to find the childish perspective in myself the whole time as a writer. When people criticize me for being childish or naïve…to me that is just a compliment because I am just trying to find that perspective or that point of view.”⁶ Moodysson's comments about his interest in conveying a child's point of view implicitly illustrate a primary concern in his oeuvre: an explicit interest in authenticity. Moodysson's interest in authenticity is further developed in two recent prose narratives, one framed as semi-autobiographical, Döden & Co (Death and Company, 2011); another as a direct biographical report from the author's own life, En vacker sjuk plats (A Beautiful Sick Place, 2012).⁷ The perspective of youth and children so often evoked in his films connotes an investment in authenticity as well as innocence.

Authenticity, Ambivalence, Aesthetics

Plot and characterization in most of Moodysson's films appear to support a notion that the films engage with what can be broadly construed as contemporary reality; like Show Me Love, most films tend to focus on everyday situations, locations, and practices, with dialogue scripted in colloquial language. The director himself has repeatedly stated that he wants to make films that appear authentic, that matter, that have a social significance, and that can have an impact in the world. “Authenticity” is a notoriously complex term, however, and the kind of cinematic authenticity of interest to Moodysson appears to draw most explicitly on a social realist tradition. British directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach; Russian Andrei Tarkovsky; Americans Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes; and Swedes Bo Widerberg, Roy Andersson, and Stefan Jarl are all sources of inspiration for him, as he himself regularly recounts. These directors establish clear, affective, and emotional points of connection with an audience. Moodysson carries this legacy through his films and implements it via meticulous casting, scripting dialogue that reflects contemporary circumstances and linguistic expressions, forgoing extensive rehearsal, employing a cinematic aesthetic that draws on documentary techniques (including the limited manipulation of lighting, use of filters, or implementation of other visual effects), incorporating expressive music (particularly pop music, which is made to correlate with themes and characterization), and advocating for extremely detailed production design (locations—domestic interiors in particular—are highly significant in all of his films). Cast, crew, and other personnel who have worked with Moodysson (many of whom are interviewed in this book) have repeatedly pointed to the author's professed dedication to authenticity, whether in dialogue, casting, direction, or production design.

Moodysson's self-professed interest in authenticity also involves other aspects of his filmmaking. He describes his personality as “ambivalent” and as looking for the middle ground, searching for compromises rather than extreme positions.⁸ Strong-willed as a director and cinematic practitioner, he himself sees a connection between ambivalence and authenticity as central to his practice and oeuvre. This is, he says, “why I think I am so good at writing dialogue; I can argue and present both sides of everything.”⁹ Moodysson's use of “ambivalent” to describe himself as being able to see two sides of an issue complements a more common use of the term in English. Ambivalence is usually understood as holding contradictory attitudes or feelings about any given issue. This definition of ambivalence in fact holds true for most of Moodysson's work as well. Assessing his own legacy, Moodysson sees himself both as an explicitly “aggressive” and “political filmmaker,” yet one who is also “kind and religious.”¹⁰

From this perspective, Moodysson's films capture social moments and portray contemporary complexity. Critics have generally tended to see Moodysson's interest in authenticity located on a personal and narrative level. He “puts story-telling and the personal statement in front of [ahead of] form” and “human beings interest him more than aesthetics.”¹¹ Yet, critical to Moodysson's oeuvre is that his films are both products of their time—always in explicit engagement with contemporary or recent popular culture—and products of aesthetic and affective experimentation. His films depend on significant and divergent formal and structural experimentation.

Moodysson's films combine a socially and emotionally invested impetus with cinematic aesthetic experimentation, whether in the form of reverse film stock in Show Me Love,¹² a production-design immersion experiment in Together, reality-TV inspired digital video in A Hole in My Heart, or a postmodernist disconnect between image and soundtracks in Container. Even Mammoth's explicit use of wide-screen cinemascope aspect ratio is part of a continuing experimentation that attempts to portray human depravity against visually stunning backgrounds. Moodysson's films have continuously experimented with form—whether in terms of camera work, technology, production design, direction, editing, or soundtrack.

Part of Moodysson's aesthetic, established in Show Me Love and subsequently expanded, is to allow cinematic form and production practices to shape and contribute to the social and affective outcome of each individual film. Yet, all of Moodysson's films remain emotionally, socially, and politically ambivalent, and often problematically so. Though some aspects of all his films can appear didactic or even moralizing, rarely can a clear synthesis or simplistic message be derived from them. This cinematic trajectory was established in Show Me Love and continues through Moodysson's career. This book contextualizes this ambivalence as part of a search for authenticity and draws out its implications along a number of lines.

Despite Moodysson's significance for Swedish and European film during the last decade and a half, relatively little has been written about this director and his films—especially for an international audience. This book presents Moodysson's Show Me Love to a broad range of readers, international as well as Swedish. It follows the assumption that films are complex cultural products and that filmmaking is a comprehensive collective process. It thereby emphasizes practice-based aspects of filmmaking, including efforts involved not only in funding, producing, and distributing a film but also in collective responses to the finished product, including media and scholarly reception, awards, and other aspects of making a legacy. Information in this book is culled from a large number of interviews with Moodysson and people who are closely associated with him and have been influential in his cinematic oeuvre. Other sources include interviews with Swedish and international film scholars and journalists,¹³ as well as material from general as well as academic publications.

I take seriously Moodysson's interest in authenticity as reflective not only of his agency as a practitioner of cinematic arts but also of concerns in Swedish and European film industries during the decades flanking the turn of the millennium. This investigation, which bridges inquiry into production practices with close readings of film sequences, focuses on two unifying themes of Moodysson's oeuvre. Both are at the forefront of Show Me Love and establish a foundation for Moodysson's subsequent work. The first involves representations of sexuality and gender, particularly as ambivalently perceived and performed by adolescents and young adults. The second involves attention to spatiality as an authentic conveyor of social and affective ambivalence. The spatial elements include filming location (on-site, place substitutions, or in studio) and production design (scenography, sets, and props). Funding and industry parameters also have a spatial quality, as they have transformed the geography of where and how films are made in Sweden and Europe in the twenty-first century. Moodysson's films have been instrumental in shaping contemporary Swedish film history in both respects.

The three chapters of this book explore how Moodysson's films offer unique ways for understanding the role and function of contemporary cinema by linking place and gender, sexuality and space. In this first chapter, I outline Moodysson's background and his development as a filmmaker. I discuss key aspects of his practice as a scriptwriter and director, and indicate the people and institutions that have been crucial for his career as a whole. I also include brief references to film history and relevant cultural context. The second chapter is a focused study of Show Me Love. It addresses conditions of production, media reception, and thematic and aesthetic analyses. In particular, it investigates this film's representations of gender and sexuality as fluid, uncertain, constructed, and ambivalent. Chapter three involves a discussion of Show Me Love's geography in terms of international reception, its cinematic landscape, and the functions of location and local production conditions, and outlines this film's significance for Swedish and European film industries.

A Filmmaker by Accident?

Moodysson grew up in the small town of Åkarp outside Malmö in southern Sweden, the son of divorced parents, a librarian and an engineer. He has two older sisters. He describes growing up in a “normal” environment, in “a very normal small town, in very normal surroundings,” with parents and a stepfather who were supportive but not part of a cultural or political establishment, yet who helped instill in him a sense that “I was special in some way and very normal as well.”¹⁴ Atypically, Moodysson chose to drop out of high school in order to write poetry. He was remarkably productive, allying himself with an impressive press to publish four poetry collections and one novel by age 21, and supporting himself in the meantime by tending bars and working odd jobs.¹⁵ He was a part of the poetry collective Malmöligan (the Malmö collective), which staged performance readings and public events in an avant-gardist tradition. He moved to Stockholm to start film school in 1992 and upon graduation in 1995 left the capital to settle for a period outside the small town of Örebro and later in another small town, Kungälv, near Sweden's second-largest city, Göteborg. He returned to live in Malmö at the time of completing Show Me Love. He is married to Coco Moodysson, a visual artist and writer, with whom he has three children. Moodysson has declared himself as politically to the left of Sweden's Social Democratic Party and as a Christian—the latter an unusual public stance in contemporary secularized Sweden—but states that he does not participate in organized religious activities.

Moodysson keeps a low public profile, preferring relative anonymity in his hometown Malmö and at his family's summerhouse in the southern province Småland to media appearances. Earlier in his career he was known as a rebel poet and as an outspoken, though not always consistent, social critic. At the red-carpet Guldbagge Award Ceremony in 1999 for Show Me Love, for example, Moodysson lectured the glitzy audience (and television viewers at home) on the merits of vegetarianism and socialism, even proclaiming he did not want his Guldbagge because of the shallow commercialism of the award event. These statements (and his giving the audience the finger) gave him a public image as a radical and moralizing outsider. Later examples include his public stance against the harsh sentencing of youth participants in anti-EU and anti-US rallies in Göteborg in 2001 and against human trafficking and prostitution. With the exception of planned media appearances and press conferences, his current low profile has positioned him as somewhat marginal in contemporary Swedish public life. Agreeing to be interviewed for this book, as well as authorizing the participation of many long-term collaborators, suggests a significant interest in actively shaping his legacy and in wanting to expand on a concept already established as central to Moodysson's self-presentation: to contribute to an authentic portrayal of his career as a filmmaker.

Moodysson has indicated in a number of interviews that turning to film as a mode of expression was half-accidental: “My interest in movies came…out of being very bored with my life.…For some reason, I don't really know why, I just started to make films.”¹⁶ Even for a published and critically acclaimed poet, it was no small feat to be accepted into Sweden's most prestigious film education program at Stockholm's Dramatiska Institutet on his first attempt. “I am not quit...