[Editor’s Note: This short review previews the final night of “We Are The Best” at Film Streams tonight, with screenings at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. It’s a heartening movie, but locally-speaking, it previews the second session of the Omaha Girls Rock camp, which begins next Monday. The camp’s concluding showcase will be held Saturday, Aug. 2 at The Waiting Room.]
For punk kids, Swedish winters in 1982 get even colder with only disco and Joy Division around.
Born out of half-boredom and half-political conviction, Bobo and Klara start a bass-and-drums-only punk band to get back at the noisy pop-metal outfit at their local youth center. Iron Fist is playing too loud and they’d just crassly mocked the girls’ spiked haircuts, but neglected to note their own rehearsal time on the center’s sign-up sheet.
And that’s the first, smirking, dimple-charmed irony of director Lukas Moodysson’s We Are The Best — Bobo and Klara’s anti-establishment punk band is born out of a technicality, out of a very Swedish affection for the letter of the law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33H0ONZcSY
With no musical experience, Bobo and Klara begin tapping a bass guitar and drum kit, and find inspiration for a first song (for their unnamed band) in the form of their demanding gym teacher. And they write the lyrics while running laps.
Most of the weight of Moodysson’s story is in the heights of empathy it reaches for the girls, not in the tone or gravity of events. It’s an inoffensive rock fable by comparison to last year’s The Punk Singer, a doc about the life of Kathleen Hanna. They don’t face violence or stark poverty, but the trying prejudices of their days, the waking moments of being called “ugly” or being slighted as a mere “girl band,” pile up into a conflict that feels emotionally and developmentally crucial.
When they meet Hedvig, a shy, Christian classical guitar player — whose virtuoso performance flops at the school talent show — they invite tension and talent into their ranks. The girls aren’t outcasts so much as people who vigorously and righteously choose a social corner: the communist, anti-nuclear, atheist corner. Oh, and very anti-Joy Division.
And the most fascinating part is probably the Swedish-ness of it all, at a particular moment in history: 1982. There’s the winning, dated snobbery of wanna-be musicians and activists — Bobo critiques another punk band’s disparaging Reagan-Brezhnev song, because, don’t you read the newspapers?; Brezhnev is dead.
The film is insightfully cultural and keen in that way. You have the universality of 13-year-old girls being themselves in trams and cafeterias, and yet they accuse their adversaries of being “conservative,” or if their ire is really up, “fascist.” It’s a constant foregrounding of a Swedish anxiety over Nazism.
We Are the Best is largely constructed via quick intimate cuts meant to create a steady collage of what it’s like to spend time with the girls: in their rooms, calling each other on house phones, fixating in the mirror on the proper verticality of soap-made hair spikes. And that’s a feat of editing for Moodysson, to carefully cultivate the kind of intimacy in the lives of adolescents that doesn’t make the camera feel like a spy or intruder — that it’s as natural as the KSMB poster plastered on the wall.