She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan)
– Cathal Wogan
It was with little fanfare that Lisa Aschan’s She Monkeys arrived at the IFI in May for a brief run. It had found moderate festival success and reserved praise from international critics since its release in her native Sweden almost 18 months previously. Such films tend to be forgotten as quickly as they appear in Ireland, but this is one that certainly warrants revisiting.
The intensity of Aschan’s debut feature film is irresistible. It is formally restrained and quietly deliberate in presentation. The pace is variously absorbing and uncomfortable, and unfolds with the energy of youth, the silent fury of innate human sexuality and the natural confrontation between the two.
Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) and Cassandra (Linda Molin) first bond through a horseback acrobatics class. Their relationship is then delicately established by Aschan, whose withdrawn visual storytelling allows her young leads to flourish. The subject of developing female (homo)sexuality is so often clumsily handled, but it is with care that She Monkeys endeavours to distance itself from cathartic, “cinematic” epiphany, focusing on something more recognisably ‘real’.
Emma and Cassandra’s homosexuality remains latent, and as careful as the form that they occupy, or which occupies them. Their interactions are distant, pained and confused; the camera remaining as curious as its subjects. Like them, it resists its natural inclinations to explore, though powered by an intentional rejection of impulse rather than, as is the case with the girls, an intangible and silent apprehension of similar seductions.
Images linger. Sparse realism presents intimate set-pieces and allows the viewer dwell on stalled moments, only then to take them away. Emma, naturally the dominant personality of the two lead characters, is told by the instructor of the horseback acrobatics class that she must relinquish some of her strength and control. Presence is grace and, while grace is powerful, power is not graceful. That balance consumes the narrative and it is over this that the film obsesses.
As Emma and Cassandra’s relationship becomes increasingly frustrated, the tension grows to be almost excruciating. They are jealous of each other in their hetero-social experiences and zealous in their resulting cruelty. Aschan’s refusal to indulge becomes more evident as Emma’s younger sister Sara (Isabella Lindqvist) begins to acknowledge her own sexuality in the increasing absence of her sibling, who does not do the same. Sara, only eight years old, becomes infatuated with her cousin. Her reaction to sexual impulse is juxtaposed with Emma’s, as both are hinted (the younger more than the elder) to have been abused by their father.
It is important that the film takes away with one hand what it reveals with the other, in sexual terms. Little happens. It does not give in to the titillation that could be derived from its constituent action and errs on the side of grace rather than power. It serves to create a unique mood, violent and unrelenting, that is sincere but brutal in its execution and delivery.
The impression that She Monkeys leaves is largely due to its atmosphere: natural but uncomfortable, sensual but stoically frigid. Six months after a first viewing, it stands out after brilliant and different films from major European directors such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Michael Haneke and Peter Strickland. An auspicious debut; one hopes that She Monkeys is the start of a long career in cinema for Aschan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Honourable mention:
Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Amour (Michael Haneke)
