This is what happens when you let Jane Austen guest-write for Hannibal.
I don’t like the smile. I recall a lot of Midsommar discourse about that central relationship, seeing waft past me like distant ships on the horizon. To me, this film doesn’t seem to be much about anything, except what it’s like to disappear. I think the smile imposes a meaning – or, invites the audience to impose one – on a story that has been essentially abstract. It abruptly takes the focus off Dani’s survival from a profound trauma, and suggests instead it is a film about a break-up or a relationship. I’m not a huge fan of this contemporary tendency to water down “abuse” to any time a partnership goes sour; and most takes I’ve seen on the film miss the mark spectacularly. This is a cult, this is what it does; the abuse is not located on a person, but on a community. Christian is incidental to it.
After all, who among us has not had a boyfriend who is so totally out of his depth? Jack Raynor is fantastic as the wrong bloke at the wrong time. I’ve met so many straight men like this, a puppyish emptiness of a person for whom nothing has ever gone seriously wrong – and never will go seriously wrong – the great soft buffer of privilege creating chummy, vapid, nice but nothing people. To such men, girlfriends are another little part that makes up a full life – you see your family at weekends, focus on your career during the week, and in your downtime you play sports or read books or take her out to dinner, and that is what life is – a full map of interconnected parts; the same casualness with which he can pick up and drop the thesis topic that is his friend Josh’s life passion. Christian wants to dump Dani, and who can blame him? The straight people I’ve dated have all been much like this, a different understanding of what relationships are about or for; and they are unprepared for a queer understanding might be – an understanding formed less by politics than the reality of living.
Dani has nobody. For her, Christian stands for a whole web of social connections that are now missing. She has no family and, as far as the film tells us, no friends; she has dropped out of college, with the looming spectre of dropping out of the world of work entirely – which is to say, dropping out of the world. Dani has a need that Christian is incapable of meeting – there is no fault here, but a gulf of experience. Dani is on the brink of not-existing, and the film is accordingly dissociative. Dani is disoriented – no connections, to place or people, big wide open spaces with no-one to grip onto – but it’s not like this would be any less true at home. Things happen disjointedly; acts are followed by inappropriate reactions; people evaporate; sounds are heard without response. It’s a normal Tuesday. This is how it tends to feel – or unfeel – and one might as well unfeel it on a commune in Sweden. The camera drifts, unsure of its focus. The music is an undifferentiated mass. Always at a remove from people, who perform mechanical actions that communicate nothing, or exist in your field of vision in the distance, gestures and motions and meaninglessness. It’s slow; and towards the end, you keep feeling a climax is coming, and you’re sure it’ll be horrible, but it meanders on. There’s everything to worry about, by which we mean nothing to worry about. Its a normal Tuesday, these things happen, and then you get your coat and catch the bus.
The kind of vulnerability that a cult can smell on you.
Hårga is a dangerous community – far more consciously so than Summerisle (which is, at the end of the day, British: polite but a little awkward). This, perhaps, reflects a modern and more clearly articulated understanding of how a cult functions. The community is passively abusive: with communally raised babies and young people sent out alone into a world they are unprepared for. A communal living space where one cannot sleep due to noise, and no privacy, everyone under a single eye of the gate. An agoraphobic space which, despite being basically a field, nails the Shining’s technique of an unmappable horror setting. Elders control who has sex, there’s a tradition of institutionalised incest, and rituals which exhaust participants ahead of group catharsis, to minimise resistance. Still, it’s all fine. The camera is so diffuse that one cannot quite a grip on any of this; then it’s drifting off to something else, and that’s fine too.
Dani radiates need, and Hårga fills it; and ultimately, I feel pleased for her. This is how they get you: as the film drags on, it gradually feels like the new normal – a Stockholm Syndrome of the screen where the world outside has been blotted into nothingness – and anyway, why shouldn’t she make this her reality? It is no less surreal, arbitrary and cruel than the life she left behind; in contrast, it validates that feeling and ensures she is not alone in experiencing it.
In my review of the Wicker Man, I called it the first and final film of the genre – so Midsommar makes no real effort to disguise where it’s going, focusing instead on a disorienting mood. The film is aware of its viewer’s awareness – of Jonestown (more than one lingering camera over an unlabelled drink); of Waco (namechecked); of the Wicker Man (they get the brands out stright away). It is aware too, I think, of the sexploitation tradition associated with both Sweden and the folk horror genre (always a refreshing change to have a sexually victimised man, subverting the frat boy movie fantasy of “a trip to Sweden”; and, especially in this genre, which has always traded on the sexual threat towards women/and the audience’s pleasure in viewing it). It’s a new riff on the “cute teens go to an exotic place”; & it’s great to center male friendships on screen. Josh, the researcher who studies Midsummer traditions, radiates audience compersion for his delight and ambition. Josh/Josh’s thesis is the film’s OTP, and it sells his human fallibility of suddenly needing to break a hospitality taboo, and professional code, when his passion project is under threat.
Hårga is extremely instagrammable but always weird; the appeal is aesthetic only. (Indeed, the film’s energy level is somewhat akin to scrolling through somebody’s holiday snaps.) Unlike the classic British folk horror – there’s no power imbalances here of a social nature. One could easily make a very similar film using the cinematic tradition of American hillbillies, or a tribe in darkest Africa – or even the grime of Eastern Europe – but there’s something about Scandinavia, a “safe” and “friendly” kind of foreign, which plays into the disarming mood. Its an incredibly awkward film, like being invited to the world’s worst garden party.
The film’s surrealism effectively dodges those tropes too. It’s not, say, like The Witches (1966), which explicitly asks the audience to imagine a Voodoo rites occurring in the Coswalds. A fresh aesthetic without any recogniseably genuine folklore. If the audience brings their fear for the characters of colour in that extremely white, traditionalist environment to the film – the film seems unaware of it, never exploring that avenue except by implication. This contributes to the undifferentiated mood: there are, offscreen, the deaths of characters who make mistakes, characters who don’t; characters with white skin, characters with brown skin; men and women; locals and outsiders. The overall effect is a world in which things do not so much happen as occur. The joke about Wicker Man is, of course that it is a musical; and Midsommar is much the same, dissolving from dialogue heavy, interpersonal scenes at the start, towards a vagueness of image and sound. Rites are barely explained; they bear some distant familiarity to things you ought to recognise – like looking at your own feet, or trying to read a clock face. But it all goes away; all devoid of meaning. You turn into symbol; why not be flowers, why not communicate only through wails and huffs. There’s no time, not here, not any more; acts hold no meaning, and progress to other acts – or don’t; without clear beginnings or end, without reason. Perhaps you can go to the library later, or the park, or nowhere; it’s all the same, more or less.
This is what it feels like. You drink, you sit, you watch someone plummet from a cliff, then maybe you bake something.
Astercote Herald 