Christian Zetterberg | Skoldiscot (Slow Dance) / 2018

dancing boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Zetterberg (screenwriter and director) Skoldiscot (Slow Dance) / 2018 [6 minutes]

 

A former child actor, Swedish director Christian Zetterberg has for several years now been focusing on the issues of young children faced with LGBTQ feelings and behavior. He explores, this aspect, a new territory that is often ignored due to adult feelings of not only discomfort in even imagining childhood sexuality, but the now international fears of discussing childhood sexuality for fear of it appearing to be related to pedophilia.

      But Zetterberg’s children are not relating to adults—who, in fact, often close off and disapprove of quite normal explorations of young boys with regard to their questions of sexuality and gender—but innocently exploring the boundaries of their own sexual desires.

 

   There is perhaps no better model of this than Zetterberg’s Slow Dance of 2018 where a young male, Kevin (Philip Kuub Olsen) attends a school dance and quite clumsily seeks out the opportunity to dance. His friend Anton (Gustav Berghe), working the “high school non-alcoholic bar,” keeps pushing his friend to go up the girls to ask them to dance. Kevin attempts to approach them, but immediately backs off, announcing before he even reaches the gaggle of females and their one male friend, that he has to go to the bathroom. There he sits tortured for his inability to proceed. Why, he wonders, must it all be so complicated.

      Dance after dance occurs, but he has still not been able to get up his courage, his friend Anton again attempting to persuade him to simply ask a girl to join him in a dance. In his imagination, Kevin attempts to imagine what he might say, but constantly backs off. He claims he’s waiting for a slow dance. And finally, when the last dance of the evening is just that, a slow dance, he gets up the nerve to ask. What we suddenly realize is that it is not one of the girls he is seeking out, but the young boy with them, Kim (Joshua Hayman Melkersson).

       Whether he truly does ask him or simply imagines the scene, he finally has his dance, the two of them beautifully holding one another in a slow piece that truly demonstrates their sexual identities. No one even seems to notice them, and certainly no one objects, which may suggest it is, after all, just a fantasy.

      But we would like to believe that, once the shy Kevin has gotten up the nerve to break the sexual barrier, that none of his peers are disturbed by the event. Of course, we know that itself to be a kind of fantasy. Even today, gay behavior is not easily approved by children made into bigots by their parents. And even Zetterberg, in his later film, Shower Boys (2021) reveals how hysterical parents still are for their sons even innocently exploring the world separate from the normative male sexual stereotypes. But the beauty of the possibility of the two boys finally being able to dance away in a cloud of romance makes the film a true gem of LGBTQ imagination.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024)