Jimi Vall Peterson | Sova över (Sleepover) / 2018

penguins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jimi Vall Peterson (screenwriter and director) Sova över (Sleepover) / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

In my day, “sleepovers” were something that occurred between two young teenagers or, perhaps, slightly older teenagers who were either very best friends or looking to become something else. When someone “slept over” after 20, it was usually on the couch or even the floor if it was a student pad. Generally, one did not share the same bed unless they meant business.

     Maybe it’s different in Sweden, or the 20-some year-old boys of Jimi Vall Peterson’s film are just a little slow in coming round to their sexual maturity. Nothing wrong with that; I certainly was a slow learner when it came to sex. But even I, after age 20, knew what it meant to share a bed, which I did quite often in those days.

     Emil and Adam (Hjalmar Hardestam and Simon Eriksson) actually do act far younger than their age, as Emil fantasizes about a dinner for penguins, and presents his friend with a pretend popcorn kiss—putting a kernel between his lips while sticking the head forward as if inviting the other for a kiss, an act which reduces Emil to giggles. These two cuties appear to want something more than their obvious friendship.

     Evidently Adam has a girlfriend who doesn’t seem to mind, at least for Adam’s side a phone call, that his friend Emil is sleeping over. And we have to wonder, why do their already seem to be photos on Adam’s wall of him and Emil is a previous “sleep over.”

     In any event, a night rain turns the boys’ faces into lovely surfaces on which to project the rain drops and the light they reflect, creating emotions that the boys may or may not be feeling within, giving the film a highly dramatic effect as Adam, it appears, is the one who plays footsie with his pretend-to-be-sleeping friend. Emil simply opens his eyes fully and turns over to prevent any other such possible dangers.

      And the next morning, as the boys quietly share their breakfast, it is clear that, once again, they are both disappointed. Adam finally begins their pregnant conversation “I was thinking about….”

 After a long pause, Emil replies, “What?”  When he receives no answer, he tries again, “What were you thinking about?”

      “I was just thinking about the penguins.”

      “Yeah, they’re coming now soon. We’ll have to buy some penguin feed and…”

      “Salt water?”

      “We better stuff them full of food to make them very tasty.”

      And so, the film ends, the boys having to live with the fantasy of entertaining the dressed up, presumably “adult” selves they are still not ready to reveal to one another.

      In the end, it’s a sort of sad statement about a kind of arrested development, which, in fact, is what happens to many young men afraid to come out of the closet, turning instead to behavior that society has trained them to imitate.

     It is perhaps no accident that of all instances of seemingly same-sex relationship in animals, it is most prevalent in penguins, who have been known through instances in zoos around the world to seek out, hatch, and raise foster chicks. Do these boys know that? Was that the subject of the movie they were watching? Are they talking to themselves in code? If so, at least they have promised themselves that it might happen soon, perhaps as early as that very afternoon.

       Alas, this film doesn’t seem to want to further pursue the matter of their inabilities to accept their own feelings. And what we witness, instead, is only the same playful testing of the waters of 12- to 17-year-old-teens that we have seen in dozens of gay films since it has become permissible and fashionable to make them.

        At 20, these boys suggest possibly more serious problems: futures that may not be lived out in accord their inner desires.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).