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Friday, June 29, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW
Turn Me On, Dammit! (Fä Meg Pä For Faen)
Alma's Awakening: Scarlet "A" Becomes Scarlet "D"

Helene Bergsholm as Alma in "Turn Me On Dammit!", directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen.  Marianne Bakke
    
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Friday, June 29, 2012
Did something ever happen to you when you were very young that no one would believe?  Something so bold that when you told them they laughed at you and mocked you?  Kids say the darndest, cruelest things, and in Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's feature film debut "Turn Me On, Dammit!", an endearing, quaint romantic comedy from Norway, teenager Alma (Helene Bergsholm) experiences adolescence and sexual awareness.  Like any teenager or adult she fantasizes and masturbates.  Her cloistered, prudish mother can hear every ooh and ahh from Alma's bedroom and is ashamed, mortified and petrified.

At least Alma is in touch with herself in the staid, boring town of Skoddeheimen, the artifacts of which are seen and described by Alma in droll voiceover at the start.  The objects glimpsed could have been rejected for entry to an exhibit of Norman Rockwell Americana but one thing is certain: this sleepy Norwegian town needs an enema.  Alma has designs on Artur (Matias Myren).  The injection happens in an instant: Artur has, in split-second Anne Bancroft "Graduate"-like style, flashed his penis and prodded Alma with it.  Or has he?  Alma publicly announces this at her high school with Artur present.  No one believes her.  Alma instantly becomes a scarlet "D" when Artur denies any crude behavior.  "Dikk-Alma" is her new nickname.  She is a pariah and laughing stock.  Alma imagines things but it doesn't mean they are not real to her.

"Turn Me On, Dammit!", a movie about love, coming-of-age, voyeurism and the sudden embarrassments and exhilarations of teen sex and desire, plays as a modest and sweet comic-book fantasy adventure.  Bursting with humor, idealism and purity, it's literate and sincere, as are the performances, particularly by Ms. Bergsholm and Malin Bjørhovde as Alma's sister Sara, who develops a pen pal relationship with a death row inmate in Texas, and finds love with a boy who smells, shall we say, "natural".  There are your usual childhood rivalries between girls envious and eager to get more attention than the next.  There's a yearning for freedom of all kinds and the children are bolder and more daring to rebel than the parents are ready for them to.

Despite its comedy there's an authenticity and truth to Ms. Jacobsen's film that is admirable and winning.  It's refreshing to observe a film about adolescence and sexual liberation that is so effortlessly unselfconscious.  ("American Beauty", a similar-themed film on adolescence and liberation, by contrast hyper-stylizes and papers over its own vacancy with excessive self-consciousness and melodrama.)  One of the more impressive and consistent things about "Turn Me On, Dammit!" is its wry humor.

The adults of Skoddeheimen have closeted sexual relations, while the children explore and experiment.  Expression and description are the two clear instruments that are tested or threatened in "Turn Me On, Dammit!", and it's no accident that Alma's sexual maturing is directly tied to the need to open up the repressed Nordic attitudes that permeate the adults and children in her school.

Ms. Jacobsen's film doesn't fail to editorialize about what its characters view as the imprudence of American jurisprudence, and "Turn Me On, Dammit!" might on one level be read as a satire about American puritanical values exported to the already conservative and homogeneous Norwegian way.  Alternately though, it's more a satire about a rural town that collectively needs to get laid (out in the open).  To this end, Alma is the film's exhalation valve, and many a middle finger is raised throughout the director's story -- a finger as a symbolic digit of rebellion and puncturing of the uptight and stuffy air that initially chokes these characters.

With: Hentelle Sleenstrup, Beato Stefting, Lars Nordtveldt Listau.

 "Turn Me On, Dammit!" is not rated by the Motion Picture Association Of America.  The film however, contains sexual content and brief graphic nudity.  In Norwegian and English languages with English subtitles.  The film's running time is one hour and 13 minutes. 

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