Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Writer: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Stars: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen
Synopsis: After her six-year-old son is accused of sexually harassing another student, Elizabeth (Renate Reinsve) is left reeling as her status as a public figure gets used against her.
It’s no wonder that the cryptic trailer for Armand, Norway’s official entry for Best International Film that made the Oscars shortlist, has made a meal out of one of Renate Reinsve’s best scenes in the film. It’s the moment where, after not being able to bear any more troubling revelations about her son, she breaks into uncontrollable and uncomfortable fits of laughter.
The tears come shortly after.
Following her breakout role in The Worst Person in the World, Reinsve turns in another incredible performance — this time, as Elizabeth, a mother and public figure who finds her life torn apart from within after she is called to her son’s elementary school. She finds out the news that another student has accused her six-year-old son of sexual misconduct.
As Elizabeth tries to process the news the best she can, she finds the people around her closing in on her (mainly fellow concerned parent Sarah, played by the cold Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and drawing assumptions based on her past and the recent death of her husband. While Armand starts off with an interesting enough premise and a claustrophobic setting to draw us in, focusing exclusively on the adults in the situation and how they handle the news, the film loses its grip along the way.
If the premise sounds similar, just last year, Germany’s Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge also followed the implications of a major accusation at a public school, disrupting the teachers’ notions of social stability. Like that film, the moments of satire and dark comedy that director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel brings to his directorial debut, particularly towards the beginning, are what give Armand its unique edge. The constant starting and repeating of the parents’ conversation with Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), a junior teacher who thinks she has it all together but doesn’t know the first thing about handling such situations, speaks to the way the school as a whole — and society — has no real protocols in place to productively move forward in such situations.
But as Armand stretches along its unnecessary two-hour runtime, Tøndel’s script loses its edge, instead focusing on Elizabeth’s secretive relationship with Anders (Endre Hellestveit), who is married to Sarah. As the film continues, the circular conversations become less of a necessary conceit of its commentary and an extension of the story’s inability to really dig into the controversial subject it’s tackling.
Tøndel increasingly relies on the efforts of Reinsve, the film’s most exciting performer, to bring real complexity and intrigue to Elizabeth. At first, her character’s true intentions and motives are unclear, allowing Reinsve to play so much more with ambiguity. The cast around her is also incredibly solid, mainly Hellestveit’s turn as the father of the child who is doing the accusing. But as the script begins to steadily unravel, it almost becomes tabloid-y, with each revelation losing sight of the foreground question that made the film interesting enough to sit down and watch in the first place.
Cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth breathes style into the film with his unique and innovative camera choices, including moments in which the faces surrounding Elizabeth at the school fade to the background, leaving her completely alone. Even in some of the film’s bigger swings that don’t quite land, like an unexpected dance in the school hallways, Rokseth’s creative choices always place the viewer in Elizabeth’s subjective experience.
Armand doesn’t have an entirely unsatisfactory ending, with a silent moment in the rain providing an unexpectedly stirring turning point, yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that the script simply tries to wrap too many loose ends with too tight a bow. What remains is another excellent turn from one of Norway’s most exciting actors, but only the slight payoff of what could’ve been a true examination of a vulnerable school system in freefall.