Christian Tafdrup | En forelskelse (Awakening) / 2008

i know how you feel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Tafdrup (screenwriter, from an idea by Jonatan Spang, and director) En forelskelse (Awakening) / 2008 [39 minutes]

 

Christian Tafdrup’s En forelskelse (Awakening) creates an even more difficult situation for a young man who, after discovering his sexuality, is quite ready to enjoy its new possibilities. That is primarily because the man who accidentally reveals the young teenage boy Carsten’s (Allan Hyde)

same-sex desires is his girlfriend’s father Stig (Lars Brygmann).

      From the evidence of the film’s narrative, you would never know that Carsten is not a happy heterosexual making out with his girlfriend Melissa (Jule Grundtvig Wester). In the first scene of the film the two high schoolers have just come from a costume party, he dressed as Aladdin, she, perversely, as Hitler—which may say something about her rather domineering relationship with him—Carsten presumably in the process and dropping her off at her home. Melissa suggests he meet her parents, but the boy is rather embarrassed for his outfit. The clearly open-minded Stig and Birgitte, however, not only invite him in, but encourage him to stay overnight with his girlfriend in her bed. High school sex is obviously not a problem with this liberal couple, but the fact that the kids can hear the parents in the next room having sex poses some uncomfortableness for the youths.

      The next morning, when Carsten rises early he encounters Stig, who serves him breakfast, and taking him into another room, offers him a sweater to wear over his open Aladdin blazer on his way home. Spotting two stuffed ducks in the room, Carsten asks about their presence whereupon Stig describes the joys of duck-hunting which he sees primarily as a way of communing with nature while enjoying some quiet time alone. But we sense something else going on between the two that we cannot quite explain, but which even Melissa perceives when she later suggests that his parents liked him and have invited him and her to their summer house.

       Melissa apparently has no desire to take up their offer, but Carsten clearly wants to get together with Stig again and subtly manipulates his girlfriend into perceiving that it might give them time to be together alone, without the pressures of their high school activities and friends.

        Once more Carsten is greeted with friendliness, and Stig invites anyone who wants to join him on a duck hunting foray the next morning. The women immediately bow out, but one can see that Stig is ready to take him up on the offer, until Melissa refuses for him. Yet that morning, the boy rises early and seeing Stig packing up the car, carefully removes himself from his girlfriend’s embrace to join the father. They journey pleasantly to the spot, not saying anything of great importance, Stig realizing as they park that he may have left his duck-call device back at the house, leaning over the boy to find it in the glove compartment; the very next instant he suddenly plants a kiss on Carsten’s cheek.

       Carsten sits stock-still without registering either protest or even amazement as Stig repeats the kiss, this time head on, before apologizing for the clearly inappropriate action. Still in some shock, the boy watches Stig take his gun and kit out of the car and begin to walk off. Finally, he too leaves the car to follow Melissa’s father, who suddenly realizing the consequences of what has just happened suggests they call off the hunt, as they return home with vague explanations to the women of why they have so immediately returned.       

     Nothing is said, but that night as Carsten helps Stig by drying the dishes he is washing, the boy whispers an apology, as if somehow he were the one who has behaved badly. And perhaps he has, in his own thinking, for not having responded to the man’s kisses in kind. What is clear is that he no way found the kisses objectionable.

        A few days later as the boy and his girlfriend sit together, she again repeats how much his parents like him and it is obvious that he, in turn, enjoys their company. At first, he concurs. But when she repeats it once more he briefly loses his temper, wondering why she need reiterate the fact. Surprised by his reaction, she pulls away, as he apologizes, wondering when, given her busy racquet-ball schedule, they can again share some time alone. She lists a schedule of activity that will keep them apart for several days.

 

        Knowing that she will not be home, the next day Carsten stands before her parent’s doorway. He is about to turn and leave when Stig finally appears. He asks the question he already knows about Melissa being home, but has another excuse ready by returning her father’s sweater. Stig invites him in, and the two begin a totally meaningless conversation about how the two teenagers make the perfect couple. Almost mid-sentence, Carsten breaks down into tears, expressing what perhaps he has never even carefully thought out, let alone previously spoken:

 

                     I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t understand.

 

    Stig hugs him close in an attempt to calm him, repeating that he knows what he feels. Inevitably, the two find their hands slipping down into each other’s pants, both attempting to salve their frustrations with a moment of grabbed love.

      Before they can continue, they hear the entry of Melissa and her mother returned home since the court was overbooked, Melissa’s racquetball contest cancelled. The men quickly tuck in their shirts and re-buckle their belts, as Carsten is led up to Melissa’s room.

      They kiss but she senses something is amiss when he breaks away, finally admitting that he has “met someone” who he’s “been with” presumably meaning sexually.

      Steeling herself, Melissa asks: “Who is she?”

      His answer is so honest that even the viewer is a bit startled: “It’s not a she. It’s a guy.”

     Furiously she commands him to leave, which he does, returning to the living room to whisper to Stig that he and his daughter have just broken up. Stig is obviously shaken by the news, but when Carsten asks him if the two of them might get together again, he responds as we know he would and must: they can never again meet, there is now no way to see one another ever. Stig opens the door, Carsten starting out, once more apologizing but nonetheless stating that it has been a pleasure to know him. Stig agrees that that knowing him has been special, briefly hugging him before the boy leaves the house forever.

      It is interesting that because Stig remains locked in a lie, living a closeted life, it is Carsten who must suffer. If Stig also suffers—as we know he does—it is of his own making. Carsten will quite obviously meet someone else. But the adults of the films of this genre, just as Stig, have little recourse to experience other such “precious moments” with the youths who in their straightforwardness have broken the chain of living hidden lives.

      We know nothing of Carsten’s home situation, yet we can assume that the elder male could not offer them anything more than the first kiss and other attendant sexual activities, serving merely as the sought-out agent of the younger boys’ successful coming out.

      This Danish film of 2008 is one of the most open and accepting films that explores how young boys sometimes need the help of an older mentor/lover to bring them into sexual realization, an issue not readily discussed in contemporary US cinema.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).