The Lukas Moodysson who made Together in 2000 has been missing in action ever since. Its charmingly optimistic look at a Seventies Swedish commune and tremendous use of Abba was followed by severe and sometimes experimental films, self-flagellating and touched with despair, as Moodysson confronted how truly terrible lives can be.
We Are the Best! is, in startling contrast, about a pair of 13-year-old punk schoolgirls in Eighties Stockholm, and fizzes with wide-eyed idealism. Based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel, Moodysson lets his young actresses Mira Barkhammer (as introspective Bobo) and Mira Grosin (as impulsive, fearless Klara) carry the film. Both seem to be having the same bubbling, sugar-rush fun as their characters who, fiercely determined that punk isn’t dead, form their own band with Christian classical guitarist Hedvig (Liv LaMoyne), adding much-needed musical competence on bass.
Romantic rivalry over a schoolboy punk singer (best song: “Reagan Brezhnev Fuck Off!”) only briefly intrudes on the girls’ music-fuelled happiness. Parents and siblings are vaguely annoying but supportive (and in the amusing case of Bobo’s mum, too sozzled with her latest bloke to fully grasp what her daughter’s up to).
The girls are rebellious, but basically content, with no awful authority figures to fight. The result is an appealing but very slight film, by a director who has pumped himself too full of endorphins on his return from the dark side. Girls the age of its heroines may think differently. If We Are the Best! passes on punk’s questioning, can-do spirit, Moodysson will be even chirpier.
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