It's a frighteningly dismissive gesture, just one of many from the adults who surround the girl and show minimal concern for her welfare in the Swedish coming of age drama The Girl (2009). She's left in the care of an aunt Anna (Tova Magnusson-Norling) who immediately asserts her flakiness by perpetually clutching a glass of wine, listening to records and inviting the local longhairs she meets in town over for a house party. While Anna sleeps it off, it's the girl who cleans up the dirty dishes, vacuums and otherwise performs the acts that would normally fall to an adult. In an attempt to either keep Anna occupied, or inspire her to leave, the girl pens a letter to Anna's one-time boyfriend. The letter entices her heart throb to arrive in his sports car to whisk Anna away. It's the little girl's second abandonment at the hands of a family member, but she proves ever-resourceful and preternaturally independent in dealing with her solitude.
Swedish director Fredrik Edfeldt's spooky, insightful debut feature The Girl, written by Karin Arrhenius and set in a dreamy 1981 Sweden before the arrival of cell phones, texting and the Internet as life lines to the outside world, has a sense of veracity in conveying the sensations of childhood; both the sense of discovery and the tentative reservations about the adult world that looms outside of it.
The film attempts, and largely succeeds in summoning up the experience of early adolescence. It captures the girl's curiosity about sex, paging through the anatomical drawings in a medical book. It shows the sexual one-upmanship and rivalry involved in her relationship with a chubby neighbor and her savvier, older new friend. It shows her delight, alongside her farm boy neighbor Ola (Vidar Fors) in the natural world of tadpoles and insects.
With her fine strawberry blonde hair, pale skin and slight frame, Engstrom evokes a Sissy Spacek circa Badlands (1973) fragility and innocence. But Arrhenius and Edfeldt are well-aware of the complexity of children, their resilience and also their quirkiness. The girl does not buckle with her aunt's flight, but embraces both the adventure and the loneliness in experiences that range from the mundane (trying to scrounge up food) to the sublime (taking a hot air balloon ride). Her family has to go far away-to Africa, to some tantalizing liaison with a sports car driving swain--for new experiences, but the world close at hand is a treasure trove and adventure enough for the girl.
Despite the golden light of Hoyte van Hoytema's (The Fighter, 2010, Let the Right One In, 2008) exquisite cinematography, a sense of menace, and expectation of danger hangs over The Girl. Director Edfeldt is attuned to the creepiness of this scenario of a little girl abandoned, alone in the wild with only a questionable family--a hairdresser and her gruff, drunken husband--close by (there appears to be a reason the girl's parents did not leave her in their care). Views of the home at night, with the girl illuminated passing by a window emphasize her solitude and vulnerability. But the girl is more enterprising, flinty Jodie Foster in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) than the victim we take her for. It is Edfeldt's greatest triumph: presenting girlhood in all of its possibility, inventiveness and self-reliance. Indebted to Engstrom's haunting performance, The Girl is a film that gives dignity, depth and grit to the experience of being a child.
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by Felicia Feaster
