Leo

Swedish films usually are known to play it safe with the storyline, often mixing drama with psychology. This attempt on a thriller/drama,tries to examine the moral compass inside the protagonists. We learn about makes up the driving force leading up to a personal vendetta,including the clichéd stereotypical. There's the Yugoslavian gangsters with bad mouth, a psychologist asking dumb questions and the pizza-owner who has no influence over his son's actions. The violent anticlimax of "Leo" makes you wonder where all the creativity of the scriptwriting went. How this for a plot; Josef Fares would have played Leo and had to battle not just the loss of his girlfriend. Also there would be some racism of the Swedish gangsters, and at the same time be helped by his friends to understand morality and ethics. It could actually have been some trilling tension, when Leo with friends finally meet up with the antagonists in court...

Josef Fares and his cinematographer Aril Wretblad make the interesting choice of showing what might be a crime thriller through hand-held closeups of the protagonists. There's shooting, but you don't really see it, people die, but you only learn of it through implication. There's no procedural hunting down of the uncivil louts who have started it all. Instead, there's a session with a psychiatrist at the moment the hero Leo's grief turns to hatred and he begins intending revenge. Leonard Terfelt pretty well sustains the attention to a face that could elsewhere do comedy and even here has to let people think "things are fine." The thought of revenge triggers a vaguely middle-eastern turn to the music, which isn't necessary. One could instead reference legendary Scandinavian revenge stories. But here's a story told without big guys swinging axes.

From this year's Berlinale, one of the films that lingers in my mind is becoming conflated with a 2007 offering from the same country, Sweden. It's hardly a country that comes to mind when I think of immigrants, which just goes to show how quickly all the old patterns are changing. Last year's film was När Mörkret Faller (When Darkness Falls). It primarily starred immigrants and consisted of 3 vignettes, the first of which blew me away. It was a very psychologically complex portrayal about how a family of Turkish immigrants treat the lost "honor" of an independent-minded daughter.

Similarly, this year's offering, Leo, was also concerned with violence and its effects on victims' loved ones. The film was violent and disturbing, but I always distinguish between gratuitous violence (which is worthless) and that which teaches us something. This film, for me, definitely fell in the latter category, as Fares asks questions about young men struggling to find appropriate responses to violence, and at the same time define their manhood. In listening to the post-screening Q & A with Fares and co-star Salehi, I caught only a few glimpses of maturity and insight. But the main character was played by professional actor Terfelt and the process of filming clearly relied on a synergy between the three that added up to something greater than its individual parts. All three may merit watching in the future, to see if further talent materializes.