Old Yorker

Gräns

Ali Abbasi (2018)

Tina (Eva Melander) works for the Swedish border agency at a ferry port.  Her extraordinary ability to detect smugglers makes her a uniquely valuable member of the customs inspection team.  The human equivalent of a sniffer dog, Tina finds her upper lip starting to twitch whenever contraband comes near; she can smell the guilt/fear/shame emitted by passengers with illegal goods on their person.  Early on in Ali Abbasi’s Border, Tina uses her special talent to detect and confiscate a memory stick filled with child pornography.  As a result, her boss enlists her help in the police investigation of a paedophile ring suspected of child trafficking.  Tina is a woman of indeterminate age and intimidating appearance.  With her stocky build and oddly swollen face, she doesn’t conform to conventional standards of beauty, to put it mildly.  She shares her home, an isolated woodland cabin, with Roland (Jörgen Thorsson), a ratty-looking dog trainer.  When he’s had a few drinks, they occasionally share Tina’s bed too though she’s quick to remind Roland they won’t be sleeping together in the more meaningful sense.  The only other person Tina sees regularly is her increasingly absent-minded father (Sten Ljunggren), in the old people’s home where he now lives.

One day, a mysterious male passenger (Eero Milonoff) with facial features similar to Tina’s comes through customs.  She asks to search his bag, which contains maggots and a device described by its owner as a maggot incubator.  Tina remains suspicious and a male colleague takes the man into a back room to conduct a strip search, returning to report that Tina should have done the search:  the passenger’s genital anatomy is apparently female.  On his way out of customs, the maggot man tells Tina that his name is Vore and that he’ll be staying in a local hostel.  Immediately drawn to him, she visits the place, where she finds Vore eating maggots.  He offers her one and Tina seems to enjoy it.   At her invitation and to the displeasure of Roland and his Dobermans, Vore moves into Tina’s home.  The two become close:  Tina’s admission that she has a chromosome deformity that makes having sex difficult and bearing children impossible doesn’t deter Vore in the least.  When the couple make love, Tina grows a penis and mounts Vore.  ‘He’ then explains to ‘her’ that, like ‘him’, ‘she’ is a troll.  (All references to the protagonists’ gender and humanity, above and below, should really be in inverted commas.)  A bodily feature the pair share is a large scar on the lower back – the result, says Vore, of surgery they underwent as newborns to remove their troll tails.

Introducing his unusual fantasy at the London Film Festival, Ali Abbasi assured the audience that Border should be watched ‘as you’d watch any other film’:  the movie was ‘an experience’ that involved no ‘intellectual fiddling around’.  In contrast, the widespread critical praise for Border is being expressed in the tonier terms you’d expect for a film that won this year’s Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes.  A few examples:

‘Border is less invested in glib symbolism or political commentary than in the specific, felt experience of being adrift between social boundaries and categories’ [Devika Girish, Film Comment Magazine].

‘An indie full of smart allegories on immigration politics’ [Andrew Karpan, Film School Rejects].

‘Border lives on the edge of several genres while exploring new territories within the realms of love, beauty, and morality to convey what truly sets one apart from being a man or a monster’ [Marisa Mirabal, Slashfilm].

These reasonable reactions to the film expose as disingenuous Ali Abbasi’s it’s-just-a-movie-lose-yourself-in-it line.  Unless they switch their brains off for the duration of the Border ‘experience’, viewers are virtually certain to see Tina and Vore as representatives of the ‘different’ and consequently stigmatised; to note the motif of dividing lines between human and bestial behaviour as well as geographical borders; and to connect the paedophile ring’s abuse of children with the historic mistreatment of trolls that emerges from the story.  It transpires that Vore has a key role in the paedophiles’ baby traffic:  he claims it’s a kind of revenge on what was done to his kind in the 1970s.  This distresses Tina, who believes vengeance isn’t the answer.  (If she’d been less distressed, she might have queried with Vore, since he also claims that humans don’t need help to do bad things to their own children, whether he really needed to lend assistance.)  Tina’s father’s failing memory recovers enough for him to confess to her that the psychiatric hospital he once worked at was a prime location for torture of and experimentation on trolls.  Her father adopted Tina and raised her as a human being:  she eventually discovers the grave of her actual parents in an extensive troll burial ground.

The source material is a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who worked with Abbasi and Isabella Eklöf on the screenplay.   Border is quite a short film too but also one of the longest 108 minutes I’ve sat through in some time.  Everything – including the leads’ changes of expression under their heavy silicon masks – happens very, very slowly.  Until Vore enters her life, Tina shows greater fellow feeling with the animals in the woods around her home than with human beings.  This never raises suspicions about her true identity because, although her own looks are supposed to make her a misfit, nearly all the other people in the world that Abbasi creates are, beside the various  wildlife, bleakly unappealing.  Roland, the only entertaining character in evidence, comes closest to being an exception.  The film, photographed by Nadim Carlsen, is so dark-toned that the images are sometimes hard to make out.  Even so, the persistent gloom of the visuals made watching this film at the Cineworld Leicester Square IMAX punitive – though less punitive than entering and getting out of Cineworld, where every corridor and escalator is decorated with flashing lights.

12 October 2018