Flickan

Written by Karin Arrhenius and directed by Fredrik Edfeldt, Flickan (The Girl) is a film about one summer in the life of the titular, nameless young girl. Things don’t start off too well for her. For starters, she just got an immunisation shot in preparation for a trip with her family to Africa. You can put up with that sort of thing when you are going on an adventure. But it turns out that the aid organisation for which the girl’s parents are working did not expect a ten year old to accompany them. Her parents decide to go anyway and leave her in the care of her aunt while they are away.

The girl quickly decides that she doesn’t like her young aunt’s bogan (or whatever the equivalent Swedish expression is) friends, and devises a very effective plan for getting rid of her aunt so that she can have the summer all to herself. And that’s when the adventures really begin. Except that these adventures are not of the Tom Sawyer sort, nor even the kind found in Ray Bradbury’s classic novel of a child’s summer, Dandelion Wine. Rather, the girl’s adventures are propelled by her increasing loneliness and the combined affects of hunger and an infection perhaps arising from her immunisation shot.

Blanca Engström as the young girl is a remarkable presence here. She is on screen for perhaps 99% of the film, and that is a lot to ask of a child performer, especially when she hardly speaks throughout the film and we have to divine her thoughts and feelings through her expression alone. Our ability to read her psychic state is helped considerably by Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography, which makes intelligent, artful use of the wide-angle frame: situating her parents in another room while our young girl is in the foreground; framing her mother outside through the slats of a window—shots and sequences that presage our young protagonist’s psychic and physical removal from her parents.

There are some wonderful scenes between the girl and her young friend Ola (Vidar Fors), the boy from the farm down the road. The casual cruelty of children leads to Ola’s humiliation by two of our girl’s friends, but Arrhenius and Edfeldt make sure that they get their come-uppance, and that our girl is able to learn to be brave from Ola.

The incidental music by Dan Berridge is saved from a kind of Windam Hill new-age schmaltziness by the addition of what occasionally sounds like Eno & Fripp era electric guitar and some angular chords at the appropriate moments. Luckily the music is also used sparingly and in counterpoint to the scenes in which it briefly appears.

Edfeldt has thankfully avoided the Hollywood malaise of quick, ‘pacy’ editing in favour of long, leisurely shots and a parsimonious mise-en-scène. The story thus develops through a more accessible tradition where the images are given time to sink in slowly, and the entire film develops its own particular ambience. This is very good filmmaking indeed.

Flickan (dir. Fredrik Edfeldt, Sweden, 2009)

Stars: Blanca Engström, Vidar Fors, Shanti Roney, Annika Hallin & Tova Magnusson-Norling

Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema

Screenplay: Karin Arrhenius

Running Time: 95 minutes

Melbourne International Film Festival, July 22 – August 8

www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au