Worth: $14.50
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Cast:
Ane Dahl Torp, Troy Lundkvist, Tintin Poggats Sarri
Intro:
...natural, powerfully focused.
The Swedish feature film Charter starts with a night time distress call from a child. It’s Alice’s 9-year-old son on the phone and he’s crying incoherently. What would you do? As his mother, Alice must investigate, especially when her son and teenage daughter are living with their father pending a custody case. The father holds all the power. He has a well-to-do house, a supportive family, money and the legal system.
Director Amanda Kernell underlines Alice’s relatively disadvantaged position with repeated visuals of Alice isolated in the frame, outside of homes and structures, lost, unmoored. The exteriors are beautifully shot snowy landscapes, adding to the sense of Alice’s exposed vulnerability.
Kernell has been one to watch since her feature Sami Blood won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2017. Described as a ‘uniquely understated coming-of-age story that bucks the conventions of both process and form’, Sami Blood explored ethnic racism in Scandinavia, inspired by Kernell’s own Sami heritage.
In Charter, she has assembled the same team; Director of Photography Sophia Olsson, editor Anders Skov and producer Lars Lindström of Nordisk Film Production. Her new film doesn’t quite have the same deep impact as Kernell’s prize winner, but it’s an astute and sensitive exploration of the complexities of family breakdown.
Our first introduction to the father shows him as a bully. At the same time, we learn that it is Alice who left, but it’s unclear why. Kernell offers no back story. The blanks are filled in as the story unfolds. This is astute story telling that invites us to make our own judgements and assumptions based on what is revealed at each chapter.
As in Sami Blood, the direction is natural, powerfully focused. The kids are great, especially Elina (Tintin Poggats Sarri) as the hostile, complex teen who, like her younger brother, is trying to make sense of the family split, where to lay the blame, how to handle their pain. As Alice, Ane Dahl Torp is charismatic.
The story also explores issues of boundaries and secrets. How far should Alice pry into her daughter’s privacy if she believes it’s for her own safety? The choices she makes are difficult – sometimes she doesn’t go far enough and there’s a stressful scene where she puts one child at risk to save another.
The film is split between two locations that work well as contrasting environments, physical and emotional: the stark and snowy bleakness of Sweden and the semi tropical Canary Islands. Alice takes her kids to a holiday resort, with a tacky tourist aspect to it, where Kernell uses available environments to point up her story. The strength of her characters’ acting pulls it off, though a couple of scenes, like a karaoke night, verge on cheesy.
Mainly, what the film shows is the impossibility of a broken family situation. The car crash has already happened, there’s no fixing it, only each family member somehow pulling together enough resources to move on. The film certainly shows that nobody walks away without scars.
Kernell explained it eloquently in an interview with CineEuropa. “My film is a declaration of love to all divorced parents trying every day to do their best for their children… I want to show that if a person is being judged on their every action, you will inevitably find something that’s not right. No one can pass such a test.”
