Den siste våren

Part of the ARTE film festival 2023, a film you feel you just have to see because the selected films MUST be good.

Set in beautiful and rough norther Norway, in a barren and cold landscape, we follow two late teen sisters. The younger tells the story (the film plot according to description) about how she reads the diary of the older sister.

This could lead to many different plots, but this is where the film seems to lose the direction. The older sister has a diary full of glitter, drawings, clipouts, fairly dystopian and somehow desparate. But the scenes that follow in the next 1 hour or so are like a lot of 3-5 minute shorts set together, featuring the same sisters but totally out of context. We see the older sister in a tub telling about ripping open her skin. Next the two sisters may be somewhere on a street hitchhiking, followed by them taking a swim.

You really feel like you WANT to make sense of all this, but just can't make a story of it. And you feel in the end "maybe I'm just too stupid to understand such an intellectual movie". As in the old fairy tale of the emperor's new clothes.

Then comes the film that you have been waiting for without knowing it, which, precisely in its unconcealed hopelessness, gives you hope, not that everything will be all right again in the end, but at least that you are not completely alone on the way there. One of the most valuable qualities of cinema is its function as an empathy machine, that is, its ability to generate understanding for characters who are far removed from one's own experience. Films then, where this exchange goes both ways, films that seem to understand you as a viewer and as a human being, are so rare that their very existence almost justifies all the inflated and ultimately absurd attention around funding policies, ephemeral prizes, all the essential and inessential cocktail debates about the meaning and future of cinema. Den siste våren by Franciska Eliassen, (...), is one such film.

It begins with a staccato of images, all of which one has already seen and will see more and more of in the near future, and which one nevertheless - whether for reasons of ignorance, self-protection, or sheer cognitive overload - represses anew every day, every second. The real-live, slow end of the world, whether it is now scientifically classified or not, seems to be incompatible with the thought structure of neurotypical people. The defensive reflexes that it triggers are usually not directed against its main causes, which are known, and certainly not against oneself and the habits, whose biggest problem is precisely that they are ordinary. That there is a direct connection between one's own way of life, one's own chosen behaviour and the floods, forest fires, weather extremes and - one abstraction level higher - the wars and the associated flight movements, is a fact that can hardly be thought, or at least not painlessly. What is easier to do is to redirect the disgust for these images, which represent nothing but the normality of the near future, to those who want to force one to expose oneself to these thoughts. There is hardly a figure in the present whose outward appearance as well as whose (quite polemical) sincerity in translating her worries into warnings and demands stands in greater contrast to the (mostly male) hatred she is met with than Greta Thunberg.

Possibly it's because the cognitive dissonances sound even more unpleasant in the North than elsewhere, or maybe its coincidence. Or the landscape simply offers too little distraction, the local news too little diversion, and the images of the destruction of the earth reach you less filtered. The crucial trick of Den siste våren is probably to tell its narrative as a story of sisterhood, employing the sisterly bond as an empathetic shortcut so that the distance the viewer must overcome to the inner feelings of its enigmatic protagonist also seems shorter. Eira (Keira LaHart) is "normal", Vera (Ruby Dagnall) is not, but highly intelligent, creative, sensitive, desperate. The film begins with a breach of trust that isn't one. Vera is not well, and Eira begins to read her older sister's diary. Indiscreet curiosity as an approach get closer to Vera, which is not necessarily healthy, but mental health has also been more contemporary. We experience the last moments of Vera's glow together with Eira; the sisterly gaze is filled with love, and the love rubs off on the film image, infecting our perception, but the glow undeniably dims. The diary explains without explaining; aggressive slogans and confused images reflect an aggressive and confused world, not without turning it into the poetic, but even the poetic is (almost) no longer able to bring comfort.

In the end, it is all about sensitivity. Those who react early are not oversensitive, but simply faster. The consequences they draw from their sensitivity may irritate those who haven't even noticed what's happening, and those who like to use Greta Thunberg's Asperger's syndrome to discredit the disagreeable activist from afar (so as not to have to rethink their own attitudes and habitual systems) would certainly be the same ones who would see nothing more in Den siste våren than an "admittedly" original or intense study of the clinical psychosis of a highly gifted teenager. Good actresses, forceful characterisations, original images, thought-provoking. As if reflection could still change anything about the situation.

Character development and dramaturgy promise stability, but even in the far north of Norway such now seems misplaced, and if Franciska Eliassen's first feature-length film contains flaws or inconsistencies, it is certainly not this one. The behaviours and solutions the film presents are similar in intensity to those of organisations like Extinction Rebellion, but they are entirely inward-looking: Self-hardening or involuntary resilience on the one hand, self-destruction on the other, creativity and (sisterly) community as a unifying element. The buzzword ecofeminism is bandied about, but it applies at most to the degree that some decide that the struggle is still worthwhile in spite of everything. Vera has definitely renounced outward-looking activism, hedonism is tried and abandoned as unable to fill the void. The only thing that remains is the creative cry out into the void: Vera's diary, archaic performances in nature with her sister, the film Den siste våren itself. Eira's (and our?) blockages are even less fragile than Vera's, but her perfectly understandable curiosity about her sister's diary turns her into Pandora, and all who have once opened this box know that its ghosts can hardly be tamed. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the end is that of these ghosts, quite a few are of indescribable beauty.

Dominic Schmid, Filmexplorer.

A beautifully told coming of age drama that deals with the dread forced upon younger generations by climate catastrophy, the destruction of the planet and its nature.

Seen through the eyes of her younger sister we follow Veras detereorating mental health and her manyfold and ultimately doomed ways to cope with the screaming injustices of the modern world and the hopelessnes she faces in a late capitalist dystopia, be it through art or hedonistic escapism. Cleverly, the film uses a beautiful Norwegian scenery as backdrop for its themes about the destruction of nature and the inevitable decay of all life in a world obsessed with growth, without showing the destruction itself. Rather, we experience its inescapable omnipresence in the psychosphere, as to underline, that there is no periphery we as humans can escape to from what we have done to ourselves.