Holiday

Living Moll

Holiday
Denmark/Netherlands/Sweden
2018 Directed Isabella Eklöf
UK cinema release print

Warning: A few of the sequences described her could technically be classed as spoilers by some, although they have no bearing on the plot of the film.

I didn’t know what Holiday was about before I saw it in, it has to be said, a less than packed screening at the ICA. The trailer looked interesting but in no way did I get a vibe that this one involved gangsters... or I wouldn’t have bothered with it. Real life hoodlums are pretty scary and it’s very rare that I enjoy any cinema about them (except for The Roaring Twenties... that was great).

This film is no exception to my ‘gangster movie’ rule... I didn’t really enjoy it on a personal level. However, I suspect people who are into this kind of material should get a lot out of this and, though I personally found it gruelling in terms of a ‘boss’ ruling the roost plot’, there is a heck of a lot to be admired in the way this film is put together technically.

The movie is made interesting... quite apart from the female perspective of it being written by two women, one of whom also directed this... in that it focuses on the main protagonist Sascha, played by Victoria Carmen Sonne, who is the new ‘girlfriend’ of the main kingpin of the area, Michael, played here by Lai Yde. And when I say girlfriend I mean she’s basically a ‘gangster’s moll’ and the events of the film are all seen through her eyes in the first week or so of her employment as she joins Michael and his extended ‘family’ as they go on holiday. What it’s really about, from what I could tell, is the integration of Sascha into her new way of life and how quickly she learns how things are going to have to be from now on.

Okay so, first of all, the performances are all pretty good, as I would expect from this kind of movie... these are not special effects extravaganzas and they can’t rely on much other than solid performances. So all is good with the cast. There’s one ‘real sex’ scene of non-consensual assault which I’m surprised got through UK censorship in which Michael sticks his erect member down Sascha’s throat before pulling out and ejaculating all over her face which I wasn’t expecting and I was amazed that the actor in question could ‘finish up’ in the short amount of time it takes him to do this on screen (it’s all done in a one take shot). Not sure I’m exactly envious of this actors ‘speed’ but it was somewhat impressive in some ways (although I wasn’t overstruck on the content of the scene and, after waiting all movie for the scene of ‘sexual violence’ noted at the start on the opening certification card, I eventually had to conclude that the BBFC must have meant this sequence).

There were three elements for me which made this film, at least, interesting to watch. The first would be the camera work. There are some nice compositions in here using screens split by verticals.... there’s a wonderful shot near the start which is the first of the ‘reflective surfaces’ shots (I’ll get to that in a second) where the screen is literally split up into six or seven vertical planes (maybe more) as we see Sascha looking at herself in a changing room with her reflections bouncing off various mirrors. There are also a lot of shots where the camera stays in more or less one position but swings around and sometimes away from the main action to reveal the content from a different angle as, say, it swings around Sascha when she approaches the camera when arriving at the airport so it can catch her again as she moves off in another direction. There are a few moments like this in Holiday.

Now then, ‘thing two’ is the contemplation of reflective surfaces. There are a lot of moments where Sascha is seen in reflection and quite often there is some distortion captured in the glass which is probably a visual metaphor for something... although I possibly am missing what that is. When Michael has drugged Sascha in a scene and is playing with her unconscious body, there’s a similar ‘mirror’ shot where the two are totally distorted in the glass and I’m wondering why the director was doing this kind of thing at certain points. All very interesting though and it gives the film a level of something to look out for that I wasn’t expecting.

The third interesting element is the arc of the film. From very early on Sascha makes friends with a ‘civilian’ called Thomas, played by Thijs Römer and, all the way through the film I was waiting for something bad to happen to him at the hands of the criminal gang. So there’s an underlying tension cutting through the whole movie that things just aren’t happening in a safe environment and I kept wondering why Sascha kept doing stupid things which no ordinary person would do, to put both him and herself in the danger zone. The reason was revealed, for me, in a moment just before Sascha has a motorcycle accident she's been warned about, where her badly cut and buggered up knee amazingly has no scarring tissue or bruising on any subsequent scenes (blimey, I’ve still got pain and bruises weeks after I bashed up both my knees). It’s at this point things finally began to dawn on me and I realised that, the reason Sascha is courting this kind of provocation is simply because... she is really stupid. This film is about a really idiotic person trying to learn the ropes in the underworld and, the surprising thing about it is... when a scene of violence does come towards the end of the movie, it’s an entry into acceptance and the scene you are expecting doesn’t go down in the way you thought it would. And the way a certain character acts afterwards rams it home about the real headspace in which Sascha is leading her life. So this took me completely by surprise and, for that at least, I am grateful to the director, who is obviously someone who knows the craft of movie making well and is able to play with accepted clichés and turn them on their head confidently.

The film ends with two shots from two different scenes but which have a nice symmetry about them because they are both truncated down the middle by a vertical made up of either a piece of architecture or a person and, as such, one echoes the other and makes a natural, visual conclusion. It’s good that there are still some directors out there who know how to construct a sequence of shots after some of the stuff I’ve seen recently.

So there you go... due to the gangster content of this movie, I didn’t so much enjoy Holiday as much as I admired it on a technical level. Most people do not have my squeamish personality, though, when it comes to these kinds of movies so I would recommend it both as a good film for most and also, for cineastes or whatever these people are calling themselves these days, from the stance of observing a director who is very much at the height of her art already. Try and see this one if this is your kind of subject matter.