AmakoaAkana

I Just finished a fabulous film, just what I was looking for. A Norwegian film: Flukten Over Grensen (The Crossing 2020) about three Norwegian children who try and help two Norwegian Jewish children escape across the border to Sweden. I loved it, just what I needed was a lot of childlike sweetness in the face of brutality and terror. If I had to choose between rewatching Schindler's List, and this film, I would choose this one.

I would also like to draw attention to the perfect performance by the unknown child actress who played Sarah, Bianca Ghilardi-Hellste and Greda played by Anna Sofie Skarholt. It has been a very long time since I have seen such sweetness in a relationship on film.

Note that the terror and brutality are not graphic, there are no massacres, no machine-gunning. But the children know what awaits them if they make an error, and as real life children do, they make plenty of them.

American films have got to be pretty bad. I haven't cheered one in months. They seem cold and most often depend on violence and other dystopian action. A rare find, I cheered this movie.

Until about halfway through, the only thing that kept me watching were the two children: Lucy played by. Erica Tremblay, and Hannah, played by Amelia Crouch. Without them, there is no movie, no one to protect or care about, essentially just a bunch of barbaric aliens invading the Earth with strangely primitive weapons. In spite of all the bad-mouthing in other reviews, I found the children to do a pretty good job of acting like children in the circumstances. Lucy, and her stuffed monkey, plays a key scene early in the invasion and in the entire moral and emotional plot line.

I mean, when are they going to make a film where the alien weapons are silent, like a virus or a prion or some other fantastically advanced organic and sneaky way to take over the planet. Why do aliens always have their machines that look like insects (or squids?) and creak and groan and bust up everything in the way. Nevertheless, fans of blowing up whole cities with maximum explosives will love this.

So, I would have given the film a 9 on the children's roles, and a 4 on the primitive alien invasion. And a half point added to the average for the last twenty minutes.

Coming of age movies have become a rare genre and excellent ones even rarer. My Extraordinary Summer with Tess deserves a place with the classics, a near perfect C of A movie.

To begin with, the scenery around the Dutch island is fabulous. I always wondered what those Friesland islands look like, and now I know. Miles of nearly empty white sand beaches, but beware of the muddy quicksand at low tide, as you will see. In addition, the lighthouse becomes, to me, an important character.

Eleven-year-old, Josephine Arendsen plays Tess and switches between moods lightning fast. Unlike many off the present day crop of Coming of Age movies, she is utterly real. Not adorable, not particularly feminine or pretty, or nerdy, she just comes across as a real person. I suppose my favorite part is when she shows Sam, the young boy who falls in love with her, her diary documenting the search for her father. Sam, bumbles his way through being Tess' companion in her search, his relationship with her echoing through his head while he wanders the island training himself to be alone.

I am not much of a reviewer, but since this movie doesn't seem to have a review, and was featured on IMDb today, I wanted to let folks know that I have included my copy along with the best of Coming of Age movies and highly recommend it.