TheRealMarQs

Had the opportunity to watch this film on the streaming service of the swedish public service TV.

There is a strange ambience to this film. It is told without a traditional, straightforward narrative, through a string of self containg scenes, like fragments or episoed of a dream, each invloving two or rarely three people from a large ensemble of recurring characters. Some of these scenes are surrealistic or dreamlike, others more straightforward, gloomy realism. The movie as a whole definitely give me dreamlike and surreal vibes. I wasn´t to fond of that first, felt that I would have liked some more sense and story. I felt like I was just floating about through unconnected pictures and moods. It felt pretty and charismatic, but strangely empty. I paused my playback for a week or so, and when I returned for the last half hour, I really enjoyed it! I guess one needs to be in the right mood to appreciate its strangeness.

It makes me associate to either a gloomy Jaque Tati, or a slightly less surreal and fragmented Roy Andersson.

Cinematography, scenery, photo and mood are terrific. Actors are good too.

I was fortunate to find this gem on the MagellanTV service, and immediately knew I wanted to watch it, based on it being a documentary about a succesful environmental campaign to save a piece of wilderness. It´s nice to get to hear about some success sometimes... I can´t remember ever hearing about this campaign, which is weird in itself, but I´m all the more grateful for finally been brought up to speed. It is just a wonderful and hard hitting story of resiliant resistence and connection between humans and nature!

But there are two stories being told parallell to eachother, and I´m not absolutely certain I think that was a good idea? Or if only it should have been executed differently perhaps?

Alongside the story of the campaign in the early 80s, there is a present day story of the son of one of the activists, following in his father´s slipstream as he paddles down the river, like his father did as an element of the campaign.

It´s a nice idea, and his story does add another dimension of time and legacy to the content. But. In order to put these stories parallell, the whole movie is edited in a manner that -to my senses- becomes a little overcrowded, with all those other people involved that are interviewed about their engagement back then, as well as loads of nice archive footage. So much of the movie is about the campaign, that every time it briefly switches over to the guy "alone" on the river,...well, something about it rubs me wrong. It is probably more a matter of editing than it is a matter of the story being out of place.,I guess.

Also -and this might be seen as nitpicking- but the movie uses a trope many docus use, and which I loath. Namely; the guy is allegedly alone on his two week journey down the river. He says so straight out. But it is very obvious that he isn´t, since he´s being filmed. I very, very, immensely prefer filmmaking that does not narrate the camera crew out of story. It doesn´t need to be much, but some disclosure if even in passing, that tell the viewer what is really happening, behind the illusion projected on the screen. I realize that this is a matter of creative storytelling choices, not a matter of anyone actually believing they are fooling viewers into thinking the cameraman isn´t there. Still, to me it feels like a lie when someone accompanied by at least one person (even if maybe only occasionaly meeting up) speaks to the camera about their lonesome journey.

Had this been any other story, I would have taken off one or two more points for the editing and the undercover cameraman, but I can´t give this story any less than a 9!

This is one of the best portrayals I´ve seen on film, of mental illness in general and psychosis specifically! It walks a line between two ways of mental illness-portrayal, keeping an almost perfectly balanced mixture of both.

On the one hand, we have the very realistic "from-the-outside" perspective, where we get to see the mother lose grip of reality, becoming ugly, aggressive and deeply delusional. The actress Josefin Neldén does this insanely well(yup, that pun came naturally, and I had to let it stay!). If she hadn´t managed to get across such a realistic image of a human in psychosis, this film would have fallen flat. But she does, and damm, to be able to project that state in such a manner can not be easy acting. But of course, the writing plays a part as well. She has insightful material to work with.

So, while the first ("outside") perspective rests almost entirely on Josefin Neldén´s deliverance, the second is more about the script and a sort of ambience of the movie. This is harder to pinpoint in a few words, but the film conveys somewhat of an "inside" view of psychosis. How it is experienced from the inside. This could have so easily gone wrong (it often does) and become hyperbole or pure artsy surrealism (or simply too one-dimensional and coherent so that it will speak to sane minds), but it hits just right at the target for the most part. It´s difficult to explain how, without having to become very lengthy, but I feel this movie have managed to portray a psychosis -which is not subject to normal ways of rationale and coherence- in a way that is coherent and rational from the perspective of someone who have themselves had first hand experience of the spectrum of that phenomenon.

This second perspective is navigated very well by Josefine Stofkoper playing the daughter.

To put it more concretely, the daughter´s world/mind is also fragmented (from being just a kid, and from having grown up in symbiosis with someone who regularly enters into psychosis) and her stay in stockholm is shattered by her mothers sudden relapse. This state of hers is portrayed beautyfully. Her mother´s world view melts into the daughter´s, and there is a definitive innuendo lurking in the movie that the daughter might herself become ill with time. But, she is also a kid, experiencing a sudden independence in the big city. Playing around, making a friend, looking for her father...or did she? WE don´t always knows what happens in the tangible world of physics, and what stems from her imagination. And a second layer of un-knowing is, that we don´t know how much is her own possible impending illness, and how much is quite normal youthful imagination.

I feel movies rarely are able to handle this much ambiguity (being very realistic, and dreamlike at the same time) without becoming disjointed and possibly uninteresting, but this one does the job.