Flugt
Jonas Poher Rasmussen (2021)
A couple of days after I saw it, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film won an unprecedented hat-trick of Oscar nominations – for Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Best International Film (for Denmark). That’s an indication of how formally unusual Flee is, although it’s not unique – Ari Folman’s docudrama Waltz with Bashir (2008) is an antecedent that immediately comes to mind. That fine film was an autobiographical memoir; Rasmussen, although he appears on the screen in animated form, is telling someone else’s life story: Flee is about his friend, Amin Nawabi. Except that’s presumably not his real name – and in this respect Flee makes innovative use of its medium. Text at the start explains that some names and locations have been changed to protect those concerned. We hear (again, presumably) the real protagonist but we can guess that the versions of him and his family that we see, strike a balance between fidelity to the originals and preserving their anonymity. Rasmussen relies chiefly on Amin’s voice to convey his personality, and uses animation to disguise his identity.
Rasmussen and Amin first met as teenagers in the mid-1990s, soon after Amin had arrived in Denmark. Rasmussen knew he was a refugee from Afghanistan but has discovered only through making Flee the details of how Amin made his way from Kabul, via Moscow, to Copenhagen. The film comprises a series of interviews – almost psychotherapy sessions – in which Rasmussen encourages Amin to open up about his experiences as both an Afghan refugee and a gay man. Flee could be described as a dual coming out story. As Rasmussen told Ryan Gilbey in a Guardian piece, ‘In Afghanistan, [Amin] couldn’t be openly gay. In Denmark, he couldn’t be honest about his past. All his life, parts of himself had to be hidden away’. Amin’s accounts of his Kabul and subsequent refugee experiences vary over the course of the film. His early claim that his whole family was killed when the mujahideen took control in Afghanistan turns out not to be true. He may have got from Russia to Scandinavia either on foot or on a cargo trailer or with the help of a falsified passport, or a combination. So Flee can also be seen as an exercise in unreliable narration and, as he also suggested to Ryan Gilbey, a vindication of Rasmussen’s view that ‘I don’t think you can get to the bottom of a living person’.
Rasmussen’s opening question is, ‘What does home mean to you?’ Amin replies to the effect that it’s somewhere safe and not temporary. The closing sequence of Flee is thus a homecoming: newly married Amin moves into the house in the country he will share with Kasper, his longstanding partner and now husband, and their cats. The happy ending is, to put it mildly, a relief in light of what’s gone before but it feels too neat, and hints at a bigger difficulty with Rasmussen’s film. Too much attention is given to the choices Amin has recently faced in his life in Denmark. He has a successful academic career: should he settle down with Kasper in that idyllic countryside home or accept a research post at Princeton? Amin may well have been torn between the two but the dilemma seems trivial beside his traumatic years as a refugee – the animated dramatisation of which Rasmussen occasionally reinforces with clips of news film of events of the kind Amin is recalling. It’s true that Amin comes across as a perennial worrier. Even so, it’s jarring that Rasmussen gives all his worries comparable weight in the narrative.
I see that Flee is an admirable and ingenious enterprise but have to admit I found it uncomfortable to watch for reasons beyond Amin’s harrowing odyssey. As a small boy in Kabul, he likes dancing along to A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’, a wonderful song that generated a memorable video. The look of that video is echoed in the monochrome ‘flight’ episodes in Rasmussen’s film. Some of this hand-drawn animation is beautiful but the pulsing, mobile images were, for me, optically punishing. In complete contrast, the expressions on the simply drawn faces of Amin the child and adolescent are rarely – well, animated. Except when he’s bopping to A-ha or running through the streets of Kabul in his sister’s dresses, Amin seems glum. He has little cause to smile, of course, but the unvarying look seems to sell short the extraordinarily distressing nature of his formative years.
6 February 2022
