Moodysson: Vi Är Bäst! (We Are The Best!) (2013)

Based on a graphic novel by Coco Moodysson, We Are The Best! is a riotous, exuberant coming-of-age story set in Stockholm in 1982, revolving around a pair of tweens – Bobo (Mira Barhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) – who decide to form a punk band. Neither of them can play an instrument, nor have they ever written a song, but once they rope in a third member – Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), a guitarist – they start to make some headway, building up enough of a repertoire to perform in a local rock competition. That said, their musical progression is a bit beside the point, since it’s clear that their decision to become a punk trio is not really a musical decision, or at least not a specifically musical decision. Instead, it feels like an extension of their pre-adolescent rage, their burgeoning sense of the system that continually lambasts them for their haircuts, demeans them for being girls and, perhaps most pervasively, insists that as children they could never have anything of value to say. Yet because they are still children, there’s something wonderfully wide-eyed and mischievous about their countercultural gestures as well, an ingenuous joy that humanises their rage without ever infantilising it. Before they even think of a musical career, it’s clear that they have the dynamism and synergy of a live act, that ability to summon up chaos – and just barely contain it – that’s so critical to punk. In that sense, the film is a testament to punk as an ethos as much as a musical choice – a commitment to life as a live act - since for all the careful curation of late 70s and early 80s Scandinavnian punk the music finally feels somewhat incidental, the by-product of a restless D.I.Y. resourcefulness that improvises resistance and resilience from whatever is closest to hand. In the process, Moodysson – or the Moodyssons – beautifully capture that quintessential adolescent experience of being in a world of your own with your best friend, moving through the real world unimpeded and unobserved, fitting in everywhere because you don’t fit in anywhere. In other words, everywhere feels like an elongation of Klara and Bobo’s bedrooms – the more they tumble, scramble and sprawl across subways, public toilets and parties, the snugger and more tucked-in they feel – just as the film pays homage to an era in which bedrooms were the main venue for punk rock, setting power chords free to reverberate amongst calico, chintz and other vintage decor. Too incandescent to last, but lasting just long enough for the film to end on an upbeat note, their songs feel as if they’re over almost before they’ve begun, especially as more and more people insist that punk is dead – but that’s what makes the film such a mercurial, magical line of flight, another masterpiece from a director for whom radical feminist consciousness is and always has been irreducibly punk.