23/10/2009

Who said that the films in the sidebar Alice in the City are meant only for younger viewers? It is precisely this section that delivers a blow to the stomach in perhaps the most shocking film at the Rome Film Festival.

There is no pulp or sensationalism, however, in Vegas [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the third feature by Gunnar Vikene, which hits hard and straight. The film tells the attempts of three adolescents to avoid a violent fate that seems written in their DNA, and to free themselves of the chains that bind them to their feelings of guilt.

Thomas, Marianne and Terje meet in a young people’s refuge. Thomas (newcomer Jørgen Hausberg Nilsen) tried in vain to convince his mother to leave the violent boyfriend who hits her every night. But after the latest fight social services decide to take away the woman’s sons, separating Thomas from his little brother.

Marianne (Karoline Stemre) takes on her schoolmates as if she were Lisbeth Salander of Millennium, and wants to live with her aunt and uncle rather than the numerous foster homes to which she is sent.

Terje (14-year-old Sindre Kvalvag Jacobsen) cannot make come to terms – nor does his father help him – with having caused the death of his mother (on a ferryboat to Denmark, in an almost unbearable scene).

The issues are topical (not only in Scandinavia, although youth suicide is more widespread there than in other places), but Vikene – who wrote the script with Torun Lian – tackles them avoiding “pop sociology” as well as facile pity. What emerges is a portrait of the protagonists that is never sweetened down, within a framework that only friendship attempts to render less dim and desperate, though in which there are few rays of hope.

Produced by Cinenord and Kong Film, Vegas is being distributed in Norway by SF Norge.

(Translated from Italian)