A teen film. A teenage girl film. A teenage girl lesbian film.
I wouldn’t usually watch a film like this. I wouldn’t normally like a film like this.
But I did. I liked it very much. I was charmed by it.
Lukas Moodysson has aced this. If you write and direct a film about teenagers (lesbians or otherwise) you have got to be spot on. You’ve got to nail every nuance. You’ve got to get right under the skin of every little fickle foible. And the words he’s putting into these girls mouths to say sound and seem more or less what they would say (if they could say them)
The 2 girls playing the main leads, Rebecca Liljeberg (as Agnes) and Alexandra Dahlström (as Elin) are outstanding. Especially Alexandra Dahlström; she’s such a full of life bouncy, sassy, miss. Sweet and sour but essentially vulnerable as fuck
Agnes says this horrible thing to her handicapped friend (who is the only person to turn up to her birthday party)
‘I don’t want to be friends with a cripple who listens to Backstreet Boys or whatever shit you listen to’.
But then Elin and her older sister turn up, and for a joke, Elin is snogging Agnes.
Agnes immediately falls in love. Elin doesn’t know what to feel. She kind of liked it. But she doesn’t know why. She’s confused.
Anyway, tentatively, touchingly, she starts exploring what it is exactly she does feel about kissing Agnes.
She wants to know why Agnes is so ‘strange’.
And she’d quite like to be strange too. At least strange is better than boring, different from being stupidly normal.
‘You know what my nightmare is? That I’ll stay in Amal. That I’ll never move from here. I’ll get kids, a car, a house… all of that. Then my husband will leave for someone younger and I’ll be stuck with brats that just scream and nag. It’s so fucking meaningless’ says Elin.
And she will be getting pregnant if she’s not careful. Here she is having just lost her virginity.
Thats the boy saying that. He hasn’t made her happy though.
Elin realises that losing her virginity didn’t really do anything for her.
She doesn’t feel for the boy what she feels for Agnes.
So she’s going to have to act on her feelings.
She and Agnes have got caught, trapped, in the school toilets. They eventually stride out together, hand in hand (see first pic up above)
‘Hi. This is my new girlfriend Agnes. We’re gonna go fuck’ says Elin defiantly.
The last scene we see is not Elin and Agnes fucking. But this
Drinking hot chocolate. Being the adolescent girls they are.
Fucking Amal had its title changed to ‘Show Me Love’ (probably to satisfy the American film distributors)
The whole film made me smile. Delightful.
Teenage girls eh?
Dir: Lukas Moodysson, Sweden
7.5/10
Windows on the World 