A Norwegian thriller starring the incredible Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World (2021), which begins as a not entirely unlikely day for the parents of two students: the two six-year-olds have seemingly had a fight at school and the families are called in to try to clear up the incident. The film won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for best first feature.
What if one day they accuse your child of such a horrible thing and force you to sit in front of an improvised ‘tribunal’ made up of family members, friends and teachers? You could just shake your head, submerge yourself, get angry or listen, which is what Armand‘s protagonist (Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World (2021)) does. The film takes place almost entirely inside a school building where the facts and procedures to (possibly) take in cases like those described in the film are spelled out. An apparent aggression is the motto for a disagreement between two boys who are classmates, but also the unfolding of a family story with peculiar and unpleasant contours. The classroom, transformed into a theatre stage, allows the actors/jouers to unleash their anger, passion, drama, comedy (the blood dripping from the teacher’s nose is anti-climactic for the whole scene), energy. The result is an astonishing and virtuoso camera work that enabled its director to win the Caméra D’or Award at the last Cannes Film Festival. As the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, you could say that an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. (Miguel Valverde)
