The first little helping of Sweden, as I'm sure you've all guessed by now, is IKEA.
Going to an IKEA superstore is like taking a tour of what you hope your adult life will be like: organized, uncomplicated, affordable, but full of comfort and imagination. Some furniture stores make you feel like all unrefined and out of place because it had never occurred t
o you that you would need breakfast trays or little lights to illuminate your framed photographs, but IKEA is soo not about that. It's laid out on one long, windy path through the warehouse marked by arrows on the floor, so it feels like a journey by end of which you will have become a better person. There is something so empowering about being able to afford to create the environment you are going to inhabit, and IKEA makes it so easy. Ok that is like the definition of materialism, but seriously, if you're getting your first apartment and you have no furniture, IKEA is going to change your life. Like look at my room^Basically, if you don't recognize it from my college dorm rooms I either made it, found it, or bought it from IKEA. So word up, IKEA, I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of each other.
Sweden apparently has a long tradition of excellence in cinema, a big fat artistic iceberg of which Ingmar Bergman was only the tip. Let the Right One In, a touching film that defies classification, came out almost two years ago now, and it's an unforgettable work whose complexity and poignancy compound with each viewing. Here's the trailer, which, admittedly, must have been really hard to craft.
This movie has so much going on that it's hard to know how to frame it in a minute and a half, so they mostly focus on the vampire-thriller elements. Which is kind of a shame, because though this film addresses the murderous, bloodthirsty impulses people have, it's really a film about wanting to share your life with someone, and the sweetness of finding someone to love. The basic plot synopsis goes like this: Oskar, a painfully stereotypically Swedish-looking boy, is picked on and isolated in school, and as an adolescent, feels little connection with his divorced parents. He develops a kind of delicate, uncertain friendship with a new neighbor, Eli, whom he only ever sees in the frigid apartment complex courtyard at night. It soon becomes apparent that she is a vampire, and the man who lives with her is her caretaker, killing townspeople whenever he gets the opportunity in order to feed Eli. As the relationship between Eli and Oskar begins to unfold with heartbreaking sweetness, Oskar has to deal with the savage reality of Eli's condition, as well as the lust for revenge against his tormentors that he recognizes in himself. I don't want to spoil the ending, but man it is a doozy. It leaves you feeling warm and cold at the same time, and the whole film is equally full of meaningful contradictions. The literal darkness
of the film serves a narrative purpose: Eli can only come out at night because she's a vampire. But the fact that the look and feel of scenes featuring only Oskar and Eli is so dim and intimate while scenes of Oskar at school or elsewhere are so starkly bright also creates this fantasy world that only the two of them inhabit, which is really kind of what it feels like to be a kid and fall in love. One reviewer noted that most night scenes are illuminated from only a single point of light, creating an unspoken but definitely present 'light in the darkness of loneliness' theme. This movie is the bomb, everyone should see it. If you have Netflix, queue it up, and if you don't - like me - here's the whole thing broken up into ten minute segments on youtube. You know you've done it before.
The last dose of dopeness from the north is brought to you by Fever Ray, aka Karin Dreijer Andersson, former lead singer of the Knife and WTF? style mentor to Oberlin's Kalan the Dirty Hippie and Lady Gaga. Here's one of her videos, which are often really eerie and haunting. This one is especially Kalan-y.
Make no mistake, this bitch is CRAZY. She always performs and appears in masks or giant theatrical costumes, or a combination of the two, and her songs lyrics are often non-linear amalgams of stories and images that create a theme but not through narrative. Which I think is mad cool. And her videos are honey bunches of NUTS, but beautiful in a way that only the truly crazy can create. It makes me think how much another Norwegian Sea cray-cray got the world accustomed to the idea of opening their minds to really inventive but definitely weird art forms, and that cray-cray is Bjork. Can you imagine a strictly electronic female artist putting this kind of work out and doing shit like this in the 1990's? People would have actually thought she was insane:
Without Bjork to push the envelope of what popular musicians could be and make, Fever Ray surely could not exist. So word up Fever Ray, keep on doing your thing, keep on pushing us to appreciate new ways of expressing ourselves and forcing art to evolve.
That's all for now, thanks for reading, and here's to you, Sweden!
No comments:
Post a Comment