U
– July 22 (2018): Written by Anna Bache-Wiig and Siv
Rajendram Eliassen, directed by Erik Poppe.
Starring: Andrea Berntzen,
Brede Fristad, Elli Rhiannon Mueller Osbourne, and Solveig Koloen Birkeland. Running
Time: 90 minutes.
Rating:
3.5/4
This
movie is one of, and possibly the, most singularly difficult experiences I’ve
had watching a movie this year. U – July 22, a recreation of the July 22nd
terrorist attacks by a Christian extremist that took over 70 lives, is
both a remarkable technical achievement in immersive filmmaking and a deeply
provocative and disturbing work meant to provoke endless debate over how
terrorism, extremism, and violence can and should be depicted on-screen.
The
film focuses on the second of what was ultimately a two-pronged attack by the
terrorist (I refuse to put that devil’s name in print). After detonating a car bomb in the government
quarter of Oslo, the terrorist bluffed his way onto an island hosting a youth
gathering organized by the country’s leading political party. Once on the island, he began shooting. This second attack lasted for exactly 72
minutes before help arrived, and in addition to the 8 people killed in the
earlier bombing, over the course of the hour plus he was on the island he shot
and killed 69 more people (nearly all teenagers). Hundreds more were either injured or later
suffered from symptoms of severe trauma and PTSD.
With
the exception of an opening montage depicting the bombing, the film focuses
almost exclusively on the second attack, featuring a nearly-single-take shot
(there are a few cheat edits that an experienced editor might spot) that takes
the viewer through the entirety of the 72-minute shooting. While the exact events depicted were based on
exhaustive interviews with over 40 survivors to ensure accuracy, the characters
we follow are fictional.
What
I find most notable (and, in the end, most laudable) about the film is that it
is laser-focused on the children, on the victims of one man’s twisted ideology
and dreams of a race war sweeping the West.
The shooter is only glimpsed a handful of times, a vague,
Slenderman-esque figure at the very back of the shot. We never see his face, we never hear his
name. No psychoanalysis or tortured
hand-wringing over why right-wring extremism exists or the Fall of the
West. Just a bunch of scared, innocent
children, experiencing one of the worst traumas anyone can ever experience,
struggling to survive, knowing they did nothing to deserve this.
No
film I have yet seen does such a thoroughly effective (and, as a result,
shattering) job of forcing a viewer to, as much as is possible, gain some feeling
for what it actually is like to be caught in a mass shooting. The news reports and heated debates and think
pieces that follow in the wake of each new American slaughter quickly become
cold, distant, clinical, bloodless. No
one boasting of the benefits of good guys with guns, of the clear and obvious need
for just one person to stand up, morph into Liam Neeson, and turn hero, has
every actually been in such a situation where shots ring out, no one knows what’s
what, and the deepest of survival instincts take over. No one, except those who have, and they know
better than to make hollow boasts.
This
staggering effect is achieved first and foremost through the camerawork- the
lens through which we view everything practically functions as a person in and
of itself, one of the children running, ducking, running, glancing behind us,
hiding, then running, over and over again.
Each gunshot- hundreds and hundreds of them, land like hammer blows on
the ears, sending shots of instant, cold, reptilian fear up the spine.
Most
of the time we are close to the face of our main protagonist, Katja (played by
Andrea Berntzen). When she is hiding in
some bushes, our vision is filled with leaves and branches. When she thinks she sees the murderer and
presses herself into the ground, the camera sinks into the mud with her. When she runs, we run. When she stumbles, we stumble. This intense and utterly unbroken intimacy
places the burden of carrying this astounding experiment on the shoulders of
Berntzen, who proves herself more than up to the Herculean task. Her performance deserves to be considered one
of the most definitive breakout performances of 2018, regardless of what one
thinks about the movie itself.
Whether
or not this film, or any film about the July 22nd attacks (another
one by director Paul Greengrass is set to hit Netflix later this year), can be considered
appropriate and worthwhile, or can only ever be an unethical, exploitative
commercialization of tragedy, is a question that I am in absolutely no position
to answer definitively. That said, the context
of the production and intention of the film must, in my view, be taken into
account. In this case, the film’s
writing and production involved feedback and input from survivors and families
of victims from the start, including having some of the survivors on-set during
filming to ensure accuracy and a psychologist on hand to help the cast handle
the stress of filming. While there has
certainly been opposition to and criticism of the film, the reaction within
Norway has (to my knowledge) been largely positive. For me, that is enough to be able to consider
this movie as more than just a piece of crass exploitation.
The
devotion of the film to being an experience rather than just a documentary
means that, for many, it will fall short of what most people consider an “entertaining”
or “informative” film. A viewer going in
with no prior knowledge of the attacks will likely be extremely confused the
whole time, and will leave no better informed, because this is not a movie
meant to relate facts. Since most of the
children had no choice during the attack than to stay in one place as long as
they felt safe enough, large chunks of the film are spent in a stationary spot
with Katja, either alone or with others, stuck against a tree or a rock wall, trying
to wait out the attack long enough until they feel forced by circumstance to
move again and find another safe spot.
These long stretches are in no way conventionally cinematic- almost none
of the film’s notable sequences are- but again, this is not trying to be a
conventional film. It seeks to be an
experience, to drive home the despairing, helpless feeling of lying face-down
in the Earth, praying for safe passage through the storm, not knowing where to
turn next, and in this, it succeeds astoundingly well.
While
I did say earlier that the movie does not directly deal with the sort of
right-wing ideologies that inspire terrorism, the director found a remarkably
powerful way of indirectly refuting every argument that most right-wing
movements try to make about Western society without anyone ever having to say
it out loud. When most people think of
Norway (or Sweden, or Denmark, or pretty much every Northern European country),
they immediately picture someplace almost entirely homogenously white and
Christian. This is certainly the image
of Norway that the attacker believes in, and what motivated the attacks in the
first place. The students and young
adults who are to become his victims, however, are of various races and
religions, with one Muslim character openly worrying about the possibility the
bombing was done by Al-Qaeda and that he will face even more discrimination in
society than he already does. Boys and
girls of every shape, size, and color gather together, try to comfort each
other, and try to survive. This simple fact
of the film alone, absent any explicit commentary, is a stunning rebuke to the
mindset of such depraved persons who would look at such a gathering and decry
it as the downfall of humanity.
U – July 22 is a hard film, a powerful
film, a profoundly heart-rending experience that not everyone will have the
strength for. For those who do, or at
least hope they do, it is one of the year’s most essential viewing
experiences. Forget the sick ideologies
of hate. Forget the sad debates that
insist on a “both sides” in debates about guns and killing. Forget the pettiness of politics. Focus on reminding yourself that, in the end,
those who bear the ultimate cost for such hate and ignorance are the young, the
unblemished, the innocent, those who would otherwise offer us a better
tomorrow. They are worth more of your
time, consideration, and effort than any nutjob with a shaved head and a Napoleon
complex.
-Noah Franc
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