Jens Choong | Reel / 2013

like hell

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jens Choong (screenwriter and director) Reel / 2013 [13 minutes]

 

From the very first frames of Swedish director Jens Choong’s Reel, we realize that the skateboarding boy Robert (played, in a strange twist of casting by female actor Fanny Ketter) and his friend Victor (Toft Hervén) would rather hang out together than join their female acquaintance for a pizza. Together, they join another male friend, Anton (Norin Lindgren) and escape to a derelict building with broken windows to spray paint the inside with images of what they declare represent one another.

    But when Robert finishes his “painting,” Victor says it “sucks,” that it makes him look like a woman, attempting to repaint it, which angers Robert, who pulls away from the others. Returning, he takes a rock and throws it at the glass panes on which they have been painting. If at first the others are frustrated and confused by his behavior, they soon join him in attempting to destroy the few remaining intact glass panes, shouting and making a boisterous and joyful noise only young boys can, swearing meaninglessly by incorporating every dirty word they know into one long string of a sentence. A passing neighbor woman out walking her dog takes notice and calls the police.

      And suddenly these boys are on the run, skateboards in hand, Victor and Robert pulling away from the other, who takes another direction, finally out-foxing the police by slipping through a narrow opening in a fence and, when the police begin scouring the nearby woods, lying motionless in a narrow gulley while the policeman looks over them, scanning the territory.

     They finally run off to a metal water runway where they can rest up and skateboard off.

   Their next stop, after climbing a high scaffolding, is a rooftop looking over the city where they declare the view “fucking awesome,” take out sodas which they’ve packed, and worry a bit over their friend Anton, who may have nabbed by the cops.   

    Just like the other films I discuss regarding love between best friends here, one of the friends, in this case Victor, is moving to the next morning to another city, Stockholm, leaving Robert and Anton behind. And the two, sitting in their nighttime “splendor,” are well aware of the poignancy of the moment.

   Tearing up about not being able to see Anton before he leaves, Victor answers Robert’s question, “Will you miss him?” with an emphatic “Like hell.”

    After, Victor admits he will not miss Anna, Robert assures him he’s not interested in Anna, the woman who asked him out for pizza, either. Look at it from my point of view, argues Robert, you’ll make new friends in Stockholm, but I’ll be stuck here with all the douc bags.

    Leaning his head on Robert’s shoulder, Victor wonders what if he doesn’t meet new friends? 

    Meanwhile, Choong’s camera re-visits some of the earlier moments of the reel, showing them in the waterway and soon after in the shed where they were painting as the police arrive. We watch them once more run into the woods, and dart out of police view in the gulley. But this time the camera catches something it hadn’t previously, as they lay together in utter silence, their fingers are wrapped around each other’s hand as seriously as the fingers of the two boys in Nightfall sought out the other’s flesh.  

     And we see them in the narrative now, lying out in the night on the roof with fingers once more entwined. Robert sits up a bit and leans over his friend, kissing Victor again and again on the lips, and in so doing transforming their friendship into something else which, for better or worse, they will never forget.

     Robert wakes up on the rooftop alone, as Victor sits in his home kitchen eating breakfast. They meet up for what can only be a perfunctory and meaningless goodbye, as Robert skates away, tears welling up in his eyes.

 

Los Angeles, 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).