Tom Kietz | Fredagsbarn (Friday's Child) / 2010

the sound of the tiger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Kietz (screenwriter and director) Fredagsbarn (Friday's Child) / 2010 [11 minutes]

 

A 14-year-old-boy has a fight with his father and races from their apartment down a long flight of stairs from their high-rise unit in the Danish suburbs. The boy, Rune (Bjarke Sørensen) gets on his bike and rides to the isolated and desolate shore-line, power plants with their silos dominating the landscape.

     This film is dominated by sound. In the first few frames we hear, vaguely the sounds of that argument, but the film comes alive with the click of the boy’s shoes as he descends the numerous steps, and the whoosh of bike tires against the asphalt and the creak of its chain dominates his rush away from his home. The plash of the waters hovers over his dock-side stroll.

     As the boy wanders out over the bleak industrial landscape, a new sound now can be heard, a kind of rattle and hiss of a spray-paint can where in the distance we can see another boy, slightly older, creating a large graffiti painting against a concrete structure. Rune approaches him, and the two, who slightly know one another, talk. The older boy is Benjamin (Frei Spangsberg Lorenzen), who explains what he is writing the word “Bomb.”  Benjamin, in turn, notices a button on Rune’s coat for The Smiths, a group he’s never heard, about which Rune speaks, lauding the 1980s band with the lead Morrissey. He wishes he lived “back then,” in the 1980s. Benjamin proffers that he’s more interested in “hip-hop.”

      Indeed, these boys aren’t very much alike, so it seems, the one a slightly older graffiti artist, the other a more moody, introverted boy who his brother describes, as Rune later tells Benjamin, “Friday’s Child,” because he was born on Friday, a “slacker day.” The boys break up their first meeting quickly, but obviously something clicked between them, as Rune checks out graffiti paintings on his computer, and Benjamin describes, the next time they meet, that he has listened to the Smiths and finds their music more interesting that the other things his friends listen to at school. Both boys describe themselves as feeling apart and different from their peers. Rune lies on his bed thinking of his short time together with the other boy.

     During this time together, we see Rune as the far more imaginative of the two, seeing the two of them, as sit on a derelict couch in the middle of field of wild weeds, as being stalked by a tiger who has already eaten two others and is now out to devour them. Benjamin resolves the “play,” as he describes, it by pulling out a dagger at the last moment and killing the tiger.

      They laugh, Rune lamenting that it’s sad they are now too old “to play.” Benjamin adds that it’s now all football and girls. Rune admits he hates football.

      But the next moment is crucial as Benjamin takes it the next step: “And girls?” Rune wisely remains silent.

      Benjamin, however, pursues the issue: “Have you ever kissed a girl?” Rune has to admit he has not. After a moment of silence, he asks Benjamin, “Have you?” to which the boy answers, yes.

      Here Rune pushes into new territory, “What was it like?”

      Benjamin’s answer, however, suggests far more than what is saying: “I don’t know. I guess it was all right. Like now I’ve tried it, you know.”

        Almost predictably, Benjamin wonders if Rune might like to try it, since he has never experienced a kiss; and after a short pause, Rune agrees the boy’s lips meeting for a brief kiss.

   Both sit back in silence, with seemingly no reaction, perhaps a bit afraid of the consequences. But soon a smile comes across Rune’s face, and a sly grin on Benjamin’s. They have obviously enjoyed it, and will surely try it out in later meetings. As if to reassert that possibility, director Tom Kietz’s sound man, Ole Fugl Hørkilde subtly reassures us with the sound of a roaring tiger and the shake and spray of a paint to indicate that their imaginations have been brought to life, and that these boys have found a new game which they can play together for a long while to come, resolving the loneliness they feel in their outsider status. Indeed, they might even be able to define the reason for the sense of being different from the others.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).