Gjertrud Bergaust | Jakt (Hunt) / 2018

the innocent are always those who are most punished

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gjertrud Bergaust (screenwriter and director) Jakt (Hunt) / 2018 [27 minutes]

 

Having just left the Bolivian backlands of a Mennonite farm in Rodrigo Bellott’s Unicorn (2014), I unintentionally dived into an equally homophobic small Norwegian community that is also highly religious. Apparently, Asgaut (Håvid Kringstad Hagen) and his mother (Giuliana Consonni Blom) have just moved there because her own religious convictions. But it is a world of torture for her poor son, who obviously feels out of place—he has died his hair green, often a signal of one’s feelings of difference—and where he is tortured by local school bullies for being gay, presumably only on the basis of his being a stranger and someone who has declared his difference.

 

   Early in the 27-minute film we see Asgaut and an even younger boy being taken by the bullies to a farm shed where the bullies demand they undress. Momentarily refusing, the boys take the younger of the two, push him into a barrel, and begin to nail down the top, Asgaut finally giving into their demands of his and the boy’s nakedness, presumably a preamble for the bullies’ demand that the two boys engage in sex.

     Fortunately, the farmer, Kjell (Cato Skimten Storengen), on whose land the shed stands, interrupts the actions, chasing the bullies away and offering his help to Asgaut, suggesting the young boy might want to work for him during lambing season, offering him a glassed-in room above the barn floor where he can keep an eye during the night on the lambs and their birthing.

      When Asgaut tells his mother about his new job which will take him away most nights during the week days, she does not at all seem concerned, her focus being far more on the TV evangelist sermons she watches.

    As the lonely Kjell and the boy in need of a father figure come together, they bond in a perfect father-son relationship increasingly important for both of them. Kjell shows Asgaut how to help pulling the baby lambs from their mother’s womb, and the boy teasingly offers to dye Kjell’s red hair. In the midst of the dye-job, however, the cistern runs out of water and they are forced to wash off the residue in a nearly small pond, where they get into a lovely wrestling battle. But at the very moment hikers in the forest come upon their seeming strange behavior, the first sign that it is dangerous for a bachelor to take an underage boy into his tutelage in these parts.

       And outside of the farm, things are no better for Asgaut, as the bullies continue to taunt him in the school library and on the bus he takes to get to Kjell’s farm, forcing him, at one point, to get off the bus in which they have begun to torture him and wait for the next.

     He is picked up and given a ride by another local farmer, Svein (Hans Jacob Sand), who seems to be aware of Asgaut’s work on the farm, attesting to the goodness of Kjell, having known him, he admits, since he was just a little boy.

      Things continue on in the friendship between Kjell and Asgaut in a manner which might have solved both their problems in life, given Asgaut the security and mentorship he needs and Kjell a kind of son to help relieve his loneliness.

       But when Svein offers a ride to Asgaut on yet another day, he makes an add turn, troubling the boy, as he takes him to an isolated spot and forces the child to engage in fellatio. Afterwards, he tells the boy that if he mentions the incident to others Asgaut will be universally known as a little whore he truly is—a designation that obviously in the child’s mind will bring on further bullying and isolation.

      At Kjell’s he refuses to eat or talk, trying to assimilate what has just happened to him. When Kjell asks him to explain about his silence, Asgaut refuses, and Kjell backs off. But soon after he assures him that he is safe in telling him, and Asgaut explodes with the words, “No, it will be between you and me and everyone else. Then everyone will know what a little whore I am.”

       Kjell’s immediate reaction, is “O fuck,” responding with the single name: “Svein?” Clearly as a child he too has been forced to “cooperate” with Svein, and he now knows the consequences for both of them if Asgaut continues to stay on at his farm.

       In insists that Asgaut must leave immediately, the boy refusing, as the loving Kjell is forced to push him out the door, breaking all future contact so that the community will not begin to gossip that he is a pedophile.

       The greater tragedy is that now Asgaut has no one to turn to for help; not even a male friend can help to protect as surely the gossip will grow, presumably as Svein, protecting his own sexual behavior, will begin to talk about the boy and his odd relationship to Kjell.

        A child has just been terribly punished for having been abused, a punishment that can only bring terror to the rest of his life given what bullying he will have to continue to contend with and the lack parental support in his own house. This is, too often, what happens in such cases: those to abuse justify their abuse in the name of righteousness, while the innocent must suffer the blows of their bigotry, hate, and inner sexual turmoil.

       No one will be brave enough to break the chain of this child’s sorrow given the incredible anathema that pedophilia now represents almost internationally, a behavior so verboten that it cannot be rationally discussed. It is enough to make anyone who cares about others fall down sobbing.

    Gjertrud Bergaust has created a well-filmed and carefully crafted literary work that makes one hope we shall have such intelligent films from her in the future.     

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).