Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen | Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) / 2003

consenting when you can’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen (screenwriters and directors) Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) / 2003 [17 minutes]

 

Based on a true situation in Norway, Fremragende Timer (Precious Moments) concerns a young 15-year-old boy, Olav (Tord Vandvik Haugen), a little less than two months shy of his 16th birthday. Olav lives in a nicely furnished group home (a Norwegian teen orphanage) in an apartment with two other boys his age, in a small Norwegian town.

     The film begins with Olav showering, another boy brushing his teeth, and a third roughhousing, pretending to hump the towel-clad Olav when he gets out of the shower, obviously suggesting that these boys, if not gay, are quite sexually aware. Olav, it appears, is on his way to a date, and greets the rather dour house mother, Susanne (Toril Martinussen) on his way out.

     He crosses through a large field where he hears a mewling kitten, and finding it, picks it up to comfort it before proceeding to his destination.

    What we don’t know is that this charmingly innocent boy is responding to a personal advertisement placed in the local newspaper purposing a sexual encounter with a 30-year-old man.

     Per (Even Rasmussen) awaits in his local Quality Inn motel room for the boy, who has written him that he is of age. The age designated for sexual consenting homosexual sex with an older male not in a position of trust and authority in Norway is 16—an issue, it appears, for some anxious young Scandinavian boys. In Denmark the age is 15, and even a 14-year-old boy in Lasse Nielsen’s film Happy Birthday (2013) can hardly bear to wait the few weeks until he turns 15 enabling him to have sex with his hunky older neighbor.

      In any event, Olav and Per meet up, have enjoyable sex, and after, almost like delighted schoolboys discovering their sexuality, begin to play games, Per stalking the room under a blanket searching out the boy who keeps delightfully coming closer before withdrawing.

       At that very moment two policemen show up, finding both of them frolicking naked together.

      The man can barely comprehend what has just happened, as the boy is quickly forced to dress to be taken away by Susanne, who we later discover, has followed him to the hotel, spotting him going into the room and reported the event to the police.

      Per is handcuffed and taken away in the police car, later to be found guilty of child abuse, despite the fact that it was Olav who made the initial contact and claimed to be old enough to consent.

      Evidently the real “Per” was found guilty and imprisoned, something directors Jan Dalchow and Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen found troubling. Krutzkoff Jacobsen is quoted: “I’m not saying everything that happened was all that ’precious,’ but I can’t help wondering what the hue and cry is all about” since the boy was only 56 days shy of being of age and that he had initiated the sexual encounter.

     What’s more, as I mention above, had he been living in Nielsen’s Scandinavian sister country Denmark, the boy would have been of consenting age. The film, accordingly, brings into question some of the difficulties and, one has to admit, the absurd arbitrariness of determining legal sexual age for young men and women between 14-18.

     Clearly, given the terms established in the film, there was nothing that occurred in that room between the two males that might be described as abusive or criminal except for the societally imposed determination of age, which, in fact, may represent the true criminality of the situation. I don’t know what a sentence of child abuse means in Norway, but for a US citizen is results in a life-long punishment that often keeps those involved, no matter of what age, from living in most neighborhoods where children reside or visiting any institution or place in which children gather. And in far too many cases it means being outcast from the society for the rest of one’s life.*

   This film’s title, incidentally, comes from a work by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, whose character in his controversial novel Powderhouse describes an experience of having sex with an underage boy as representing “precious moments,” but obviously, in this case, the intense value of those moments were not worth the elder’s freedom for much of the remaining life.

    

* I might just remind the reader that in the US, legal age limited by relationship (the older male not serving in a position of trust and authority) varies from state to state from 16 to 18 years of age, with numerous variants allowing for sexual relationships with males and females who share their age groups. In California, the state in which I live, for example, the crime of "unlawful sexual intercourse" defines any act of sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 18 who is not the spouse of the person. There are no exceptions; all sexual activity with a person under the age of 18 (and not their spouse) is a criminal offense. So if a 15-year-old willingly has sex with a 17-year-old, both have committed a crime, although it is only a misdemeanor. Harsher sentences are doled out for individuals who significantly differ in age.

     The age of consent in Iowa, the state in which I grew up, is 16, with a close-in-age exemption for those aged 14 and 15 who may engage in sexual acts with partners less than 4 years older.

     In the state where I went to university, Wisconsin, the age of consent is 18 and there is no close-in-age exception. There is, however, a marital exception which allows a person to have sex with a minor 16 or older if they are married to the minor. If the minor is below 16 both sexual intercourse and any sexual contact are a felony; sexual intercourse with a minor 16-17 by a perpetrator who is not married to the minor is a Class A misdemeanor. At 17 I would have committed a Class A misdemeanor for having sex with someone of my own age, a crime of which I am certain I was unknowingly guilty during my Freshman year or, even worse for having sex with a couple of my teachers, putting them in jeopardy as well.

     In the District of Columbia, where Howard I lived for fourteen years, the age of consent is 16 with a close-in-age exemption for those within four years of age. In thirty-one states the age of consent is 16, in six states it is 17, and in thirteen states it is 18.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2021

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