by Linda Winsh-Bolard
Noomi Rapace is back. The dragon tattoo is gone, the fighter barely survives, but the actor is back.
Norwegian film Babycall seem simple and clear at the beginning: a victim of domestic violence Anna and her son Anders had been moved to safe apartment by social services.
This simple story line is already made false by the first shots shown, director Pal Sletaune is falling into the currently popular mode of using endings to start the film, but from this unpleasant yet understandable story line sprouts nightmarish cloud of past and present real, remembered and feared that any time you think you've understood it, moves somewhere unexpected.
It ends brutally and unexpectedly as well.
The end justifies practically all Anna's actions, yet it fails to save any one. Instead of answering the many questions that have formed in your mind during the screening, it poses new ones. If it is Anna's memory, real memories of failures heaped on her, that is killing her, then what kind of help should victims of domestic violence be given ? How much is enough? How much damage do they suffer and do we even know an effective way to help them?
The film succeeds in portraying the terror, confusion, damage, fear and long lasting horror that follows victims of domestic violence for very, very long time even if they manage to escape the torturer.
This is major difference in viewing victims of domestic torture. I have read, not a long time ago, a book written in late eighties or early nineties that mentions the case of New York attorney beaten by her partner to pulp while he tortured her and their adopted child. The child died, the woman survived. The author of the book writes that the nearly dead woman should have been sentenced to long prison term for not helping the child. I thought that the author was a misogynist. Twenty years ago, misogyny was socially expected and accepted. Women were expected to die for kids. Men hated women who tried to escape gas chambers in Auschwitz by abandoning their infants, and freely wrote about pushing these unnatural females, who wanted to live, to gas chambers lines. It was expected that women will gladly choke to death holding their kid even if it served no purpose. No such scarifies was expected from men.
Some things changed. Yet, in reality, people do turn their heads away from domestic violence. Victims who try to fight it in any way are often further victimized by all who they try to get help from. The charming torturers is often pitied, his version of events accepted and his reality given preference. Suspicion falls, even in this film, on those already harmed by terror of being victimized.
It looks like the director of the film Pal Sletaune, perceives this very real problems as one of the roots of the tragic consequences. It often is.
It is deeply unsettling film. Hard to watch. I expect that is the point of it. I wonder, on practical level, if it is true that baby monitors can hear other baby monitors?
Noomi Rapace is given more room to project emotions, and she does good job of it, but she is still trapped in convention that defines her by a type- small women made good victims in camera viewfinder. Her Anna is a mother with no life but through her child. Possibly this is how mothers in violent relationship view themselves, if so, much needs to be done. Even though Rapace does good job with her part, and looks ordinary this time, I wish her a role where she can laugh, go to movies and eat pie.
Her counter partner has actually more room to grow and change. His story, when he find out about it, is no less tragic, the damage done equally lasting. Kristoffer Joner is utterly convicting in the part of Helge, the one person who Anna befriends.
Special notice for a male social worker with sleazy tendencies performed by Henrik Rafaelsen as well as the nearly double role of Anders and Ole are played by Vetle Qvenild Werrring and Stig R. Amdam respectively., No sweet, obedient kiddies these two. Sullen, wanting independence, determined to help one another, very realistic growing kids in very unpleasant situation. Good job, as written as performed.
