Producer: Andrea Berentsen Ottmar   Director: Halfdan Ullmannn Tøndel   Screenplay: Halfdan Ullmannn Tondel    Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Øystein Røger, Vera Veijovic Jovanovic, Assad Siddique, Patrice Demoniere and Loke Nikolaisen   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C+

“Armand” comes off like a film whose director doesn’t entirely trust his screenplay, and so feels compelled to add distracting surrealistic touches to it.  What makes that so odd is that the director and the writer are one and the same.  Halfdan Ullmannn Tøndel is a young man with an impressive ancestry: he’s the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann.  In this second feature, however, he seems to be trying too hard to live up to it.

The film is kind of a courtroom drama though the setting is a classroom in an elementary school with a malfunctioning fire alarm that might go off at any moment (though, surprisingly, little is made of that after the first reel).  The quasi-defendant is Elizabeth (Renate Reinsve), who’s called in for a conference about her six-year old son Armand.  He was found, she’s informed, in a closet with his classmate Jon by the school janitor (Patrice Demoniere), and the story Jon later told his mother Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) was that Armand had sexually assaulted him.

The boys’ young, nervous teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) has been assigned to try to mediate the situation, but after an initial discussion brings no resolution, she’s joined by Principal Jarle (Øystein Røger) and his lieutenant Ajsa (Vera Veijovic Jovanovic), who appears to be the school counselor and the principal’s ombudsman, though her usefulness at the moment is diminished by the fact that she suffers from sudden nosebleeds at inopportune moments.  The final person in the equation is Sarah’s husband Anders (Endre Hellestveit); Elizabeth is a widow, her husband Thomas having died in a car crash.

Tøndel takes his time in doling out information about these characters.  Thomas, we eventually learn, was Sarah’s brother, and she believes that his death was a suicide rather than an accident, brought on by his fraught marriage.  Thomas was also an alumnus of the school whom Jarle still holds in esteem.  Elizabeth is a local celebrity, an actress who’s put a pause in her career to tend to Armand after her husband’s death but is notorious, and excoriated, for her flamboyance.  And Anders has a special interest in Elizabeth, though whether it’s ever gone beyond the affection of a concerned brother-in-law is unclear.  It’s also unclear whether Sarah suspects there’s something going on between them.

In fact much is deliberately left opaque about the relationships among the six people in the room.  What’s certain is that Elizabeth, who’s hearing about the complaints against Armand for the first time, is stunned but not about to take the accusations lying down.  Her behavior veers between understandably defensive and defiantly extreme—at one point she goes into a hysterical laughing jag over the accusations that makes everyone else uncomfortable (and probably many in the viewing audience, too). 

But the back-and-forth, which ultimately extends to threats to bring police and child protective authorities into the matter, does end in a quasi-revelation about what actually happened between the boys—even if, in an artsy mood, Tøndel chooses to set the final scenes in the school parking lot during a torrential downpour that drowns out any dialogue. 

Along the way, however, he indulges in sequences designed to accentuate the hallucinatory quality of what’s happening.  There’s that laughing fit, for example, and a conversation in which one character appears to be speaking to an empty space.  Weirder still are the dances—one Elizabeth performs in a hallway alone, and another in which she joins the janitor.  And then there’s an inexplicably erotic, phantasmagorical episode in which she’s pawed over and groped by the school’s teachers, who have been told of the charges against Armand by one of their own (Assad Siddique), in whom Sunna had unwisely confided.

All of this is intended, presumably, to reflect the psychological turmoil Elizabeth is going through.  And to an extent it works, although given the extraordinary quality of Reinsve’s performance, it feels unnecessary.  She invests the character with such steely, vaguely maniacal intensity that the artsy directorial tricks seem superfluous.  “Armand” isn’t a one-actor film—everyone around Reinsve is excellent, so much so that it would be invidious to single out one over the others—but she’s clearly the dominant figure. 

And what of Armand?  We glimpse him (Loke Nikolaisen) only fleetingly, as part of a children’s chorus in the school’s end-of-term show, and asleep in his bed at the close—but he looks positively angelic. 

The technical crew have certainly exerted every effort to realize Tøndel’s vision.  Mirjam Veske’s production design makes the school’s cavernous corridors feel like tunnels to Hades, and Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography, with its canny contrasts of light and shade, adds to the dour mood, as also do Ella van der Woude’s astringent score and Mats Lid Stoten’s eerie sound design.  One might criticize Robert Krantz’s editing as occasionally dilatory, but the tempo was, one assumes, the director’s choice.

“Armand” is, finally, one of those films one can appreciate more for its aspirations than its accomplishment.  But it demonstrates that Ingmar Bergman’s grandson has real potential.