This is my first non-Bergman Swedish movie but that's not really the point. This film has a story to tell and the Swedish context is relevant. It is the 1950s and Sweden is outgrowing its politics of eugenics and its flirtation with 'white' ideas akin to official racism in France and elsewhere in Europe and an inch from the extremes of German Nazism. Not everyone in 1950s Sweden was social democrat. There was still nostalgia for the old 'Germanic' ways.
Erik is a 16-year old boy from Stockholm brought up to grin and bear the abuse of his violent step father. At school his anger is unleashed in fights at which he's a brutal, merciless expert. He's dismissed from public school and black-listed from public education. This would be it for good, except that his mother has some wealth from her previous marriage and an inheritance she sells to finance boarding school for her son: his only chance at some form of a future.
Boarding school is a cocoon of fascist nostalgia coupled with Victorian/Edwardian notions of honours and aristocratic precedence. Discipline is administered by the senior boys who perpetrate relentless, brutal bullying on the juniors. The juniors have to be the slaves of the will of their elders. That is the rule. That is the tradition. No punishment is too unreasonable or too brutal. The only rectification will be had when the seniors graduate and replaced by the juniors who will have their turn to bully the freshmen.
What makes it especially hard for our Erik, and for us who easily empathise with this masterfully acted character is that we not only understand this boy's suffering at the hands of these bullies but we also know that he has the physical capability to beat these bullies to a pulp. They deserve to be beaten to a pulp but we all know there is no justice in this brutal regime except the grotesque fascistic tradition the school is embarrassingly proud of and that his reaction will only make matters worse, for him especially.
He therefore tries to deal with the bullying by taking a page out of Ghandi's passive resistance. That ultimately the humiliators will at some point realise that their victims have the moral right on their side and there is no need of violence to resist violence: one can and should fight back by turning the other cheek.
In this school, isolated from the political changes of Sweden that out there is outgrowing eugenics and politics of racial ranking, the laws of the land - of right of protection from abuse, of respect for privacy, of basic decency - do not seem to apply. In this school ancient, archaic notions of aristocratic 'honour' are the order of the day.
Erik fights back. And, in the school, and back home under the roof of his abusive step-father Gandhi's advice is not always enough.
A coming of age film that contrasts somewhat from the classical American formula for this genre. Though might is not always right, right may not always win unless it too resorts to violence. Erik had to. Erik could. Erik is therefore not a role model for the average 16 year old victim of bullying or at least not too much of a practical one because few can pull a punch like his.
Still, seriously worth watching.
Erik is a 16-year old boy from Stockholm brought up to grin and bear the abuse of his violent step father. At school his anger is unleashed in fights at which he's a brutal, merciless expert. He's dismissed from public school and black-listed from public education. This would be it for good, except that his mother has some wealth from her previous marriage and an inheritance she sells to finance boarding school for her son: his only chance at some form of a future.
Boarding school is a cocoon of fascist nostalgia coupled with Victorian/Edwardian notions of honours and aristocratic precedence. Discipline is administered by the senior boys who perpetrate relentless, brutal bullying on the juniors. The juniors have to be the slaves of the will of their elders. That is the rule. That is the tradition. No punishment is too unreasonable or too brutal. The only rectification will be had when the seniors graduate and replaced by the juniors who will have their turn to bully the freshmen.
What makes it especially hard for our Erik, and for us who easily empathise with this masterfully acted character is that we not only understand this boy's suffering at the hands of these bullies but we also know that he has the physical capability to beat these bullies to a pulp. They deserve to be beaten to a pulp but we all know there is no justice in this brutal regime except the grotesque fascistic tradition the school is embarrassingly proud of and that his reaction will only make matters worse, for him especially.
He therefore tries to deal with the bullying by taking a page out of Ghandi's passive resistance. That ultimately the humiliators will at some point realise that their victims have the moral right on their side and there is no need of violence to resist violence: one can and should fight back by turning the other cheek.
In this school, isolated from the political changes of Sweden that out there is outgrowing eugenics and politics of racial ranking, the laws of the land - of right of protection from abuse, of respect for privacy, of basic decency - do not seem to apply. In this school ancient, archaic notions of aristocratic 'honour' are the order of the day.
Erik fights back. And, in the school, and back home under the roof of his abusive step-father Gandhi's advice is not always enough.
A coming of age film that contrasts somewhat from the classical American formula for this genre. Though might is not always right, right may not always win unless it too resorts to violence. Erik had to. Erik could. Erik is therefore not a role model for the average 16 year old victim of bullying or at least not too much of a practical one because few can pull a punch like his.
Still, seriously worth watching.