Palm Springs International FF 2019: ‘Border’
By Peter Belsito and Sydney Levine
TALKING PICTURES & BOOK TO SCREEN
The Talking Pictures program of the Palm Springs FF includes in-depth discussions with directors, writers and actors from the year’s top titles. ‘Border’ aka ‘Grans’ (Sweden/Denmark) is on this year’s program with Director Ali Abbasi attending.
Peter: Border is the best film I’ve seen in recent months.
Sydney: I’m not so sure I loved it, but…
P: It is the Swedish submission for the Oscar nomination, in Swedish with English subtitles. I saw it in an L.A. theater in a series sponsored by EFP — European Film Promotion. They showed dozens of various European countries’ Oscar submitted films for press and trade in the recent weeks leading up to the announcement of the shortlist for Best Foreign Language Flms.
S: And it didn’t make the cut, BUT, it will be in Palm Springs Film Festival and it is surely worth seeing. And the director Ali Abbasi did win Best Director in Cannes this past May in Un Certain Regard, and it was shown last year at PSIFF as part of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch. It also played in Toronto and Busan so it has every pedigree it needs…odd that the records show the only Asian buyer was Anticipate from Singapore. I guess this sort of weirdness doesn’t appeal to Asian arthouse distributors.
P: The film is a bit hard to discuss because the story is so original and surprising as it goes along that I feel I cannot reveal too much of plot details because it must be allowed to unfold to reveal the bizarre, amazing, wonderful originality of the characters’ lives.
S: I would say that the reason I did not love it absolutely was because after seeing it, I forgot I had seen ‘Border’ and when I saw the photo of the protagonist(s) I was shocked and remembered, oh yes, I saw the movie somewhere, but I still did not recall the storyline. Of course now, I remember.
P: It is also a woman’s film — this is always good — but we’ve never remotely seen a woman like this one in any cinema I know.
S: And it was based on a short story (“Grans”) by John Ajvide Lindqvist with the screenplay written by Ali Abbasi and Isabella Eklöf — a woman who also wrote Let the Right One In which, when remade into English, lacked that same feminine quality. I wonder how she changed the short story to a more female-empathic character or did the actress, award-winning Swedish stage and screen veteran Eva Melander, make such a weird being so sympathetic?
P: Tina, the main character in Ali Abbasi’s Border, works security at a Swedish port. As passengers walk up a long corridor toward the terminal, she stands and looks at them. And she sniffs. Sometimes her lip curls, revealing stubby, yellow teeth. Her jutting brow ridge furrows a bit. If something agitates her, she growls. Quietly, as if trying to suppress it.
She’s good at her job. Her superhuman sense of smell makes her an invaluable team member — a kind of human sniffer dog, she can sense shame, fear and guilt on travelers. She can literally sniff out guilt. Usually she catches banal lawbreakers — underage kids trying to smuggle a little booze. But one day she detains a well-dressed man who has a SIM card full of child pornography. After exposing him, she is recruited by the police to help track down his wider circle of pedophile accomplices.
Tina lives at a remove from society, in a forest house she shares with a man who raises dogs that she can’t be around. Enlisted by higher authorities to dig deeper into the child pornography case, she’s suddenly around people who are curious about who she is and what she can do. She’s not entirely sure about these things either.
Tina is a malformed misfit, her face bloated and mottled, her teeth jutting and discolored, her body marked by ancient scars and scrubby hair.
Outside of work, Tina’s life is tragically low on joy or validation. She shares her forest cabin home with her deadbeat boyfriend Roland (Jorgen Thorsson), but their relationship is a sexless co-dependency, not a functional romance. She also has a troubled history with her father (Sten Ljunggren), who is tender and affectionate but slowly slipping away into dementia with some family secrets unresolved. More emotionally attuned to wild woodland animals than humans, Tina has resigned herself to living as an unloved outsider on the margins of society.
But then she meets Vore (Finnish actor Eero Milonoff), a fellow outcast with similarly misshapen facial features and the same highly developed sense of smell. But instead of feeling shunned and devalued by mainstream society, Vore is defiant in his beastly strangeness, grunting and snorting and proudly feasting on live grubs, insects even.
As an animal attraction begins to grow between the odd couple, Vore moves into Tina’s small guest cabin and reveals some explosive secrets about their shared heritage. These shock revelations lead Tina to a kind of liberation, but also to some painful truths about her family and decades of systematic abuse.
As the movie continues, it splits its narrative.
One thread follows Tina as she helps the authorities catch the child pornographers, another shows Vore and Tina enthusiastically and sexually explicitly exploring their affinities.
And here Border becomes very interesting and fantastical.
So we’ll leave the story here (more to come!! much more…)
By the final plot twist the movie has served up so many surprises, jumpy moments, and occasional but well-earned laughs that the surprising, unforeseen, fantastical ending works very well. Wow, what a great film!
Premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Production companies: META Film, Black Spark Film & TV, Karnfilm
Cast: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Jorgen Thorsson, Ann Petren, Sten Ljunggren
Director: Ali Abbassi
Screenwriters: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ali Abbasi, Isabella Eklof based on a story by Lindqvist
Producers: Nina Bisgaard, Peter Gustafsson, Petra Jonsson
Cinematographer: Nadim Carlsen
Editors: Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Anders Skov
Music: Christoffer Berg, Martin Dirkov
108 minutes
S: International Sales Agent Films Boutique has sold the film widely to Neon for U.S. (so you know this is a very good film!) and the now defunct MoviePass Films, TriArt for Sweden, Camera Film for Denmark, Finland’s Future Film, Anticipate for Singapore, Argentina’s Impacto for Latin America, Bir Film for Turkey, Pilot Film for Czech Republic, Film Europe for Slovakia, A-1 for Estonia and the Baltics, Aurora for Poland, De Filmfread for The Netherlands, France’s great Metropolitan Films which recently lost its beloved founder Sammy Hadida (RIP), Modern Film for Great Britain and PFA Films for Italy, Karma for Spain, Curious Film for Australia/ NZ.
