Arman : Ingmar Bergman’s grandson tries to dissect the human psyche.

Following the example of the great grandfather.

On a chilly fall evening, single mother Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve) and married couple Sara and Anders are summoned to the school for a conversation. The principal and vice principal try to dodge the meeting, as the incident is of a very intimate nature. The boys are only six years old: can their testimony be trusted? The aggrieved party believes that they can, demanding that the management take action. Elizabeth, whose husband has recently died, chooses to deny everything.

34-year-old Halfdan Ullmann Tendel, son of actress Lynn Ullmann and grandson of the great Ingmar Bergman, decided to follow in his feature debut in his grandfather’s footsteps. Arman (the name of the child, Elisabeth’s son, is in the title, but he doesn’t appear once in the frame) is a psychological drama about everyone manipulating everyone else. Random parents turn out to be not random at all, old family ties, secret affections, mutual resentments and favoritism come to light. The main thing is to be impartial,\

But, of course, it’s not just Bergman that Tendel imitates. The plot twist blatantly quotes Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, in which a girl from the senior group of kindergarten accused her teacher of harassment (in Arman, roughly speaking, in the same accusation Elizabeth). Clarification of relations on raised tones with the transition to personalities and five minutes of hatred repeat Roman Polanski’s Massacre.

The other thing about Arman is that it’s a Scandinavian-style massacre, so to speak. Everyone puts up with it for a long, long time before it explodes. Everyone pretends to be decent people until it gets really unseemly. The literal metaphors for this state are the dreadful stuffiness in the school and the faulty fire alarm system: the former is studiously ignored by everyone sitting in the assembly in tweed jackets and thick sweatshirts (sweat is already pouring down, but it is impossible to take off the woolen armor and loosen the tie). The same with the alarm system: it is simply not noticed anymore, although it is an alarm bell in every sense. The clues peek out from every corner: the blood that regularly comes from the head teacher’s nose, and even a child’s drawing shown before the credits – what more proof do you need that everything is rotten in the Danish (Swedish) kingdom!

Tendel is so fond of circumlocution that right in the middle of the movie he entrusts one of the heroines to perform a couple of dance numbers: and if the first one (about the inner tragedy) can still be somehow survived, the second one looks completely unnecessary. I would like to quote the school administration: Thank you, the details are superfluous, we have long understood everything perfectly well.

Olga Marsheva specially for 7DneyKino. Read all materials by this author.

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