Renate Reinsve did not receive an Oscar nomination for The Worst Person in the World, but she did get noticed. This past year, she portrayed a food services worker caught up in the zombie apocalypse in Handling the Undead and showed her ability to act in English in A Different Man. Her best work, though, comes in Armand, a Norwegian drama that opens this weekend for a few showings at Tarrant County multiplexes and showcases this rising global star.
The entire film takes place at a parent-teacher conference, where everybody is tense even before Elisabeth (Reinsve) shows up to talk about her 6-year-old son Armand. She’s known to be emotionally volatile, so maybe ambushing her isn’t the best idea, but that’s what the school officials proceed to do. Only when she arrives does she learn that Armand is accused of pulling down his best friend’s pants and threatening to rape him. Many parents might not handle something like this well, but Elisabeth wastes no time in demonstrating why she makes people nervous. Within minutes after that revelation, she physically corners the much smaller and clearly terrified schoolteacher (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) and accuses the other boy’s parents (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit) of molesting their own kid.
Writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is a first-time filmmaker with an intimidating pedigree — two of his grandparents are directors Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. This is not a Bergman-like meditation on the futility of life’s endeavors, but something much more grounded. Elisabeth is the one whose life and behavior are picked apart over the course of the meeting, so we gradually learn that she’s a famous actress in Norway whose husband has recently killed himself, and her erratic public behavior predates his suicide, so a segment of the press and public blames her for his death. The school officials do bring this up, as well as the fact that she has appeared naked in some of her films. However, her mental disorder doesn’t prevent her from pointing out that the other boy’s parents repeatedly trusted her to babysit their son, or from asking where a 6-year-old even gets the idea to rape someone.
Tøndel keeps adding complications on top of this fraught situation, as the school administrator (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic) keeps running out of the room because of her frequent nosebleeds, and the stressed-out teacher spills the subject of the conference to another teacher (Assad Siddique), who then tells the other parents who are gathered at the school. Bizarrely and unnecessarily, Tøndel feels the need to break the tension with interpretive dance interludes performed by Elisabeth and those other parents.
It turns out that the other boy’s parents need to be scrutinized as heavily as Elisabeth is, but the proceedings noticeably droop when Reinsve is not on the screen. It must be great to play a character who is so out of control and demanding of attention — as the principal (Øystein Røger) points out, “She’s an actress. It’s her job to make herself as interesting as possible.” — and Elisabeth pulls everyone into her crazy orbit, especially when that principal starts making arrangements for both boys to undergo psychotherapy and she starts laughing uncontrollably, to everyone’s immense displeasure. Armand would probably work better as a stage play than it does as a film, but either way, it rises and falls on the strength of its lead performance, and this movie has the right one.
Armand
Starring Renate Reinsve and Ellen Dorrit Petersen. Written and directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel. Rated R.
