A good movie

When I saw the poster, I was expecting a cute rather harmless lesbian teenage love story. However, it turned out to be so intense after all, I was actually a complete mess during and after the movie. Apparently, most people saw this movie as the beautiful discovery of a young girl experiencing for the first time love for someone else. However, in my opinion, it was actually a really unsettling creepy pedophile romance told from the perspective of the victim who fell in love with someone completely inappropriate. Indeed, she didn’t fall for someone of the same age or someone slightly older but with her  (female) teacher. To put into perspective, Selome Emnetu, the actress who played the teacher, was around 40 years old when she played this part. Ella Øverbye, who played the main character, was around 20 years old but her character was supposed to be 16. If they would have cast a younger actress, the creepy aspect would have been even more obvious. It’s interesting that when I asked my fellow viewers what if the teacher would have been played by a man, they all agreed that the romantic aspect would have suddenly disappeared which I found rather weird and hypocritical. Another interesting aspect was the fact that the young girl kept arguing that this relationship was real and coming from both sides, while the older woman actually denied it. However, in my opinion, it didn’t matter, this love story was just really messed up but it didn’t seem to be handled that way in this movie. Instead, they shift their focus on the book she wrote, half real and half fantasy coming from her mind, while she was convinced that it was how it all really happened. For me, it remains incomprehensible how her mother and her grandmother didn’t see this at all, how completely delusional the poor girl was. I wasn’t surprised that she ended up in therapy, the poor girl definitely needed it but, once again, the whole experience was completely belittled by her therapist who reduced it to some harmless infatuation. It’s one thing to fall in love with a peer you don’t know and don’t dare to approach, it’s difficult enough already, it’s however a completely different thing to experience the same feelings with someone more than twice your age when you are basically still just a kid. Anyway, to conclude, I have a hard time to judge this movie, it touched me so deeply but I think the approach was completely misguided, I still think it is worth a look though. 

7/10