It’s more worthwhile to review movies than to review reviews, but it’s impossible not to notice the ninety-six-per-cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes for “We Are the Best!,” a pallid and terminally cutesy movie that succeeds by stoking blandly happy feelings. It’s a work of self-congratulatory and sentimental escapism for the art-house audience, a sort of “No Sex Yet and a Carefree City” view of growing up. It feeds fantasies of a virtually infinite tolerance, an absence of substantial conflict, a nostalgic take on Scandinavian mellowness that seems to have less to do with the way things actually were than with a Disneyland view of the past. “We Are the Best!” markets the very idea of ordinariness, a mild and sweetened ordinariness of a calculated narrowness and a calculated safety, a life of trivial differences and infinitesimal efforts, of smooth transitions and cushioned experience.
The movie, directed by Lukas Moodysson, who also adapted the screenplay from a graphic novel by his wife, Coco Moodysson, is set in Stockholm in 1982. Its protagonists are Bobo and Klara, two girls in the local equivalent of seventh grade and best friends since elementary school, who stand out from their class with their self-cropped hair and love for punk rock. The teasing they get from the pink-clad, well-coiffed girls in their class is mild and compliment-leavened; their parents don’t give them any sort of difficulties; their biggest problem is that they don’t know what to do with their free time. A spark of an idea: they decide to use a youth-center rehearsal space to form their own quasi-band (neither girl plays an instrument—Bobo bashes the drums, Klara aimlessly strums a bass and sings their one spontaneously composed song against their gym class, “Hate the Sport.”)
But their scant musical knowledge soon hits a dead end, and they recruit an introverted and lonely schoolmate, Hedvig, a classical guitarist who’s a year older and a well-known Christian believer, for their band. It turns out that Hedvig has a quietly rebellious streak that she hasn’t yet dared to indulge openly, and her musical partnership with the bandmates quickly blossoms into friendship, even as she also turns into their mediator and surrogate den mother.
Moodysson sketches the girls’ family life with a broad brush: Bobo’s divorced mother remains good friends with her ex while pursuing relationships with a series of boyfriends, leaving Bobo, an only child, to console her and to fend for herself in minor ways (toaster-made fish sticks). A middle child, Klara sees her somewhat bohemian parents fight over domestic trivia even as they take a cheerful interest in her musical enthusiasm. In short, there’s nobody to challenge their punkish interests—for that matter, their punkishness isn’t even an attitude, it’s a minor and bloodless style statement, a matter of distinctive but unexceptionable haircuts and garments alone, without piercings or tattoos, without inclinations to violence and without anarchic rejection of convention and order.
The movie offers cuteness as a unifying principle—in this movie, everyone is cute, from the protagonists to their parents (especially Klara’s father, with his clarinet and his loud cheerfulness) to the boy punk-rockers they meet to Klara’s brother to the gym teacher whose gruff ways spark Bobo and Klara’s musical revolt. But Moodysson doesn’t have an aesthetic principle to match: there’s no cannily retro style to his view of the past, no idea of visual composition that suggests the inner glow of halcyon reminiscences.
Moodysson doesn’t define the in 1982 in terms of a style or a mindset, one that could present some under-the-surface currents of divergence or discord. Each scene, each moment, yields up its content in its entirety. The actors are directed to deliver facial expressions that sum up and close down the emotions of every scene, giving Moodysson efficient cuts that truncates a scene just as it gets rolling. Rather than watching the skilled and appealing actors add their own emotional energy to their roles, he squeezes them into the confines of his story—and of his artistic tunnel vision.
The movie shows almost nothing about the girls’ school life, almost nothing about their interests (they listen to records and read music magazines), their peers, their personal idiosyncrasies, their fears and dreams. They face neither outer nor inner obstacles, experience and overcome no adversity, face no consequences for any of their apparently audacious actions (such as begging in a train station for money that they’d use to buy an electric guitar). Their big plans take place in the comfort of an official youth center, which gives them rehearsal space and then fosters their revolt by taking them on the road for an officially endorsed performance.
There is one moment in the movie that has life. It takes place on the roof of the building on the outskirts of Stockholm where Bobo, Klara, and Hedvig visit two teen-age boys from a punk band. Both Bobo and Klara have a crush on Elis, one of the band members. He, in turn, has chosen Klara—and as he embraces her on the long, flat, snow-covered roof that’s bounded by no railing, Bobo walks far toward one end and goes dangerously close to the edge, close enough to alarm the others, and it’s Elis who hastens to bring her back. It’s the movie’s one moment of real menace, the one moment of substantial inner turmoil, of behavior that translates the near-universal experience of teen jealousy into imaginatively personal action.
Not coincidentally, that solitary moment of true danger is also the only moment in the film that’s directed well, that features an image—showing the roof, the sky, the river, the city at large, scape, and Bobo—that adds emotion and a sense of experience to the dramatic action. Though even here, Moodysson shows impatience: he doesn’t let the camera linger long enough on his actors, he doesn’t let the landscape reveal its peculiarities over time.
Happiness is as good a subject for a movie as tragedy; youthful optimism is as much a matter of cinema as is dead-end frustration. But the optimism of “We Are the Best!” is far from spontaneous or naïve. It’s a cynical sale of good feelings, a pious positivity which, with its lack of self-questioning, has the chill of propaganda. Why that propaganda should have such strong appeal is another story.
