Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love by Anna Westerståhl Stenport

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love by Anna Westerståhl Stenport Benjamin Bigelow Anna Westerståhl Stenport. Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 214 Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love provides the most comprehensive and wide-ranging commentary on this groundbreaking film to date. Anna Westerståhl Stenport manages not only to offer insightful analysis of Fucking Åmål (the original Swedish title of Show Me Love, 1998) as an aesthetic object, but also to contextualize the film within the cultural, political, and social milieu of Sweden in the late 1990s. Considering the slimness of the volume—the body of the text is only 137 pages—it is remarkable how much ground Stenport is able to cover, from the technical and practical aspects of production, to the consequences of Swedish de-industrialization and the EU-sanctioned cultural regionalization during the 1990s. Further, considering the relative paucity of scholarly writing on Moodysson available in English, Stenport’s book is a welcome contribution and an invaluable resource for an Anglophone readership approaching this influential film. In the absence of any overtly marked introduction, the first chapter, entitled “Moodysson’s Contexts,” fills the role of establishing the book’s conceptual priorities. Besides giving some background on Moodysson’s unlikely career as a filmmaker (he came to film only after establishing himself as a precocious literary talent with five books in print by the age of 21), Stenport introduces Moodysson’s work in a way that is refreshingly devoid of the classic tropes of auteur criticism. The book consistently emphasizes the contributions of Moodysson’s collaborators, from his producer, Lars Jönsson, to his editor, Michal Leszczylowski, and his cinematographer, Ulf Brantås. Stenport may in part be following Moodysson’s [End Page 363] lead in taking this broader, more collaborative view of his authorship. Stenport writes that Moodysson’s notion of cinematic authenticity rests on his “oscillation between self-affirmation and self-doubt” (p. 13), and that despite his insecurities in his own filmmaking ability, Moodysson is able to “channel his sense of uncertainty into a creative strategy” (p. 14). Fortunately for Moodysson, right out of film school he entered a creative relationship with an unusually nurturing production company in Memfis Film, which has had some hand in all of Moodysson’s feature films. Perhaps because of Moodysson’s relatively modest sense of his own filmmaking ability, Stenport takes a view of film authorship less rooted in individual genius than in the creative decisions made by a group of competent professionals. The book’s endnotes show that Stenport has relied extensively on research interviews with both Moodysson and a number of his collaborators, and the insights Stenport gets from her informants on the creative process justify her claim that Moodysson and Memfis Film have “established an updated form of the auteur paradigm” (p. 16). Although most art film directors certainly do rely on the contributions of producers, cinematographers, editors, and other collaborators to make a film, it is a well-worn conceit of auteurist criticism that the director’s vision is achieved in spite of the involvement of the production company, not because of it. Stenport’s first important rhetorical intervention, then, is to detach Moodysson’s creative achievements from the myth of auteurist genius, and instead to situate Fucking Åmål squarely within its critical, geographical, and historical contexts. Chapter 2, entitled “The Ambivalence of Show Me Love,” contains most of what could be considered close textual analysis in Stenport’s book. Even as she analyzes the film in terms of queer theory and the film’s representation of class and gender, Stenport’s tendency to contextualize the film historically and culturally is never far from the fore. She describes how geographically uneven the film’s reception was, with Swedish commentators largely downplaying the element of same-sex desire in the film, and instead implying that the film could be seen as “universal because it was not really about lesbianism” (p. 41). In an endnote to this section, Stenport draws a striking parallel to the reception of Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House, 1879), which similarly was framed as a...