Återträffen (2013)

A reunion party. The guest have come to have a nice time and to talk about the good old days, the innocent days of childhood: a night of nostalgia and jolly chatting. One of them feels differently. She makes a speech about having been bullied. The others are outraged by this way of spoiling the cozy party; why should this person come there and destroy their nice evening together? This is just the start. We realize this is a movie within the movie. Another level of stoytelling is laid out. Anna Odell is the director, now a famous artist, who has made a movie about the reunion party she was never invited to. Her project is to confront her old classmates with this film.

In The Reunion Anna Odell blurs the boundaries of documentary/fiction and she plays with ideas about acting and being. When one reads the story, without watching the film, one might get the idea that this is the director's narcissistic revenge project, in which she indulges in a story that revolves around nothing but her own ideas about herself. But this was not my verdict when I had seen the film. It's tough to sit through it, tough because the social tension creeps under the skin, but I never felt the director puts the viewer in a position in which s/he is led to admire "Anna Odell". The character Anna Odell is just as fragile, messy and conflictual as anybody else in the film.

What I found engaging in this film is the way it deals with a complex nest of images of and feelings about what a situation was like. These feelings are intertwining with the present situation: putting on a decent face, wanting to emphatize or expressing how much one is still bothered by "this person". As a viewer, I was drawn into this nest. The film maps these tensions, and looks at the nodes of a social network: the people who are accused of having been the real bullys, the mere onlookers, the passive/active cheering. Odell's own part (now I talk about the character) is complex. The film does not treat her perspective as automatically valid or exempt from challenge. She is in the middle of the tensions, but she is also questioned.