Casper Andreas | Mormor’s Visit / 2005

demanding her freedoms

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casper Andreas (screenwriter and director) Mormor’s Visit / 2005 [16.25 minutes]

 

Swedish photographer Simon (Daniele Teodoro), living in New York City, is in bed engaging in a morning bed wrestle with his black lover Justin (Dexfurth Houston) when the apartment buzzer rings. As he peeks out through peep-hole he’s shocked by what he sees: his Swedish grandmother, Mormor (Ingrid Söderblom), age 82, has suddenly arrived on his doorstep from the Swedish nursing center in which she’s been living.

      He quickly throws on a shirt, picks up her suitcase and steers her into his kitchen, stunned by her arrival, but also a bit perplexed in knowing how to explain the boy in his bed. No matter; once she catches her breath from walking up all the stairs and explains that she has flown in from Sweden with the help of another resident, Lars-Gunnar, who has a computer and the nursing home, Mormor suggests that she’s always warned his mother that he might be queer, and is curious whether the two, Justin and he, might be in a “partnership” with one another, by which presumably she means are they planning to marry. He has a difficult time explaining to her that it’s not that kind of “relationship,” but rather one that just involves “sex.” “Not much of a relationship,” she declares.

      She isn’t disturbed over the fact that her beloved grandson is gay—after all she recognizes that he has escaped to New York for the freedoms he has sought—but explains that she has “run away” because Nurse Annette took her phonograph away and, and with it, all her cassettes sent to her by Simon.

     We soon discover even worse news, that Annette has described her as a senile old lady simply because she chose arise earlier than the standard time—after all the sun was shining almost as it does at Midsommer—and had begun to dance.

       Even after Simon’s mother calls expressing her worry over Mormor’s sudden escape, she refuses to even think about going back. Simon’s mother seldom comes to visit her and when she does she only sits around with the others who are told when to rise, to eat, to sleep, even when to shit. She wants the same freedoms that Simon has found.

       In Casper Andreas’ tender and moving portrait of a woman who has suffered—as so many countless such nursing home and assisted living center individuals do—elder abuse, the AARP generation are drawn to LGBTQ figures for the freedoms they have won and now their elders demand is their right as well.

       She is fascinated by his so very “black” friend. Is it true, she asks, that black men have....? Simon quickly puts away his photographs, which she’s spotted, and gently suggests they needn’t talk about such things nor, when she soon brings up the subject, will he explain how gay men “do it.”

       Nothing much happens in this film; we know the inevitable outcome, that Marmor will eventually be shipped back home to live either with her daughter or, even worse, locked away again in the nursing home. But the rapport between the grandson and grandmother, as she begins to try on some of the costumes he keeps for his photography sessions and he is moved to photograph her, is so endearing and actors Teodoro and Söderblom are so very convincing, that we enjoy the few moments they have together during which the muscles of our faces battle in different directions between laughter and tears.

     He promises her that we will take her out dancing later that evening, probably to gay bar since, as he hints it has to be “someplace where everyone can go and do whatever they absolutely want.” And he even suggests that she may be able to stay with him for a few days and he will later return back with her and deal with Nurse Annette.

       She explains that he’s always been her favorite and she just needed to see him one more time before “they do away with me.” Simon tells her that he loves her as well. And she promises that if he believes in love he will find someone who whom he can be find a “true” relationship.

        Mormor’s Visit, it turns out, is a gift Simon might never have imagined waking up that morning in his Harlem apartment, and she will have memories and the pictures to prove it to share her upstairs friend, Lars-Gunnar, who with his computer can also perhaps explain how two men “do it.”

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).