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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Norwegian film deftly points out teen girls sexually awkward, too
Helene Bergsholm in Turn Me On, Dammit!
In the 1960s, one could always count on Scandinavian countries to come up with salacious movies about women and their sexual awakenings. They had titles such as I, a Woman, and no matter what their artistic merits, they tended to play the grindhouse circuit by the time they came to North America.
The tradition continues anyway. In 1998, Sweden produced the peppery lesbian coming-of-age movie F***ing Amal (a.k.a. Show Me Love). Now we have Turn Me On, Dammit! from Norway, about a 15-year-old girl attempting to deal with an uncontrollable sexual imagination in a town where privacy is a rare commodity.
Alma (played by model-pretty young actress Helene Bergsholm) is first seen in the throes of auto-erotic bliss on the kitchen floor, making a call from a phone sex line.
Her fantasy life may be all the richer given the staid reality of her high school existence. The small town of Skoddeheimen is an oppressive, judgmental place for a girl of Alma's potent self-pleasuring instincts. Every time she and her best friend Saralou (Malin Bjorhovde) pass the Welcome to Skoddeheimen sign, they give it a middle-finger salute (shades of F***ing Amal).
Alma soon has even more justification for her chagrin. She has a crush on a cute but awkward classmate named Artur (Matias Myren). But when he makes a clumsy sexual overture towards her at a party, she blurts out the specifics to her friends and finds herself ostracized by the entire community.
Even Saralou is compelled to keep her distance, although her behaviour is no less socially maladroit. Her ambition in life is to move to Texas and fight the death penalty, even as she writes pen pal letters to selected inmates.
Director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's most important achievement in this breezy 75-minute film is to delineate how teen girls can suffer the same sexual awkwardness as teen boys. But Jacobsen never resorts to contriving the outsize sexual humiliations of American teen comedies. She keeps things grounded with recognizable, non-stereotype characters and a galvanizing message not unlike the North American anti-bullying campaign designed to help gay kids: It gets better.
Movie review
Turn Me On, Dammit!
Starring Helene Bergsholm
Cinematheque
14A
75 minutes
31/2 stars out of five
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 7, 2012 D7
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