Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s debut feature Armand is often inscrutable. A psychological drama with a distinct theatricality wherein reality and the projected interior crises of the characters bleed into each other in a disturbing manner. The deliberate ambiguity of Armand can render sections inaccessible as it vacillates between surface and deeper meaning.
The titular Armand is a six-year-old boy who has been accused of sexually assaulting his friend Jon. Armand himself appears twice in the film; once in a harrowing choir performance witnessed or imagined by his mother Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve) and in the final scene where the child is obscured and sleeping. The audience never knows what Armand thinks or feels because, although the drama is centred on his actions, the person who is on ‘trial’ is his mother. Elisabeth is an actress, a widow, and a source of tabloid gossip. She is called in to Armand’s too large and too unwieldy school to face Jon’s parents Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit) by a Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) a junior teacher who has been told she needs to de-escalate the ‘situation’.
It's the end of term before Summer begins and the weather is oppressive. The building is humid and fire alarms keep going off. The hallways echo unnaturally. Along the entry hallway are pictures of students from previous years. The classes are small, tiny in fact, leading the viewer to wonder how it is that the building is so large. Is it a private school kept alive by money from fees? Is it something else? The building shifts and changes as the narrative goes on and each person’s possible motivations are slowly revealed.
Jarle (Øystein Røger) is currently the principal but has been embedded in the school since his early career as a teacher. He and Ajša (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic) instruct Sunna to keep everyone calm and controlled during the meeting. Sunna asks if there are procedures in place at the school for circumstances where a student has been alleged to have committed a violent and disturbing act. Jarle and Ajša talk around the issue and Sunna gleans there are no procedures at all. She is warned that she is representing the school, she should not allow personal feelings to interfere with her judgement, and she essentially should “let it blow over.” Armand is apparently a problem student and has some bullying tendencies – but he’s recently experienced the death of his father Thomas, so the school is hoping to keep everything under wraps.
Elisabeth arrives in a car which seemed to be driving too fast and parks in front of the school. She stalks down the hallway with her high-heeled shoes beating like a military drum. Her combatants sit waiting: the cold but concerned Sarah and her quieter husband Anders. Sunna ties herself in knots as the accusations are revealed. Elisabeth feels she has walked into an absurd ambush. How could her son know the terminology he used with Jon. Why wasn’t she consulted earlier of Armand’s ‘troubling’ behaviour? How is that Sarah is now suggesting, after years of allowing Jon to spend time in her home, that both Armand and Elisabeth are dangerous to be around?
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel drip feeds background information. Jon isn’t simply Armand’s best friend, he’s his first cousin. Sarah and Anders aren’t merely concerned parents, they’re Elisabeth’s former brother and sister-in-law. Sarah and her brother Thomas (who Elisabeth was married to) were students at the school when Jarle was a young teacher. It’s possible that the behaviour Armand has been exhibiting came not from Elisabeth’s so-called “tabloid excesses” but Thomas’ domestic violence. Tøndel doesn’t provide definitive answers during any of the increasingly antagonistic meetings between the staff and parents, but through whispers in corridors or meetings in discrete rooms.
Renate Reinsve delivers a staggering performance as Elisabeth – a woman loathed and desired in equal measure. Her choregraphed breakdown (expressed through dance sequences) and desperate ferocity to defend her son (and herself) from insinuations is primarily what carries Armand. In one scene where Jarle and Ajša discuss “measures” to address Armand’s behaviour Elisabeth begins laughing hysterically. Unable to stop physically reacting to the absurdity of the situation she is hushed like a naughty student by Jarle. Elisabeth’s actions and reactions are fodder for Sarah to further prove that Elisabeth is nothing more than a professional liar, a woman trained to make her victimhood believable.
Armand employs traditional and non-traditional narrative conceits. The sympathetic background of a storm fast approaching matches the pressure cooker inside the school with its spiral staircases, areas of rot, cluttered basements, and befuddling spaces. Dance acts as narrative as Elisabeth is pawed and pulled at by parents gathered for the end-of-term meetings. Gestures of sympathy and succour morph into recriminations.
The cinematography by Pål Ulvik Rokseth, who recently shot Handling the Undead also starring Reinsve, is claustrophobic and masterful adding to the unease of the film. Tøndel directs Rokseth’s camera to swing around corners to capture the gaze of the characters as they embrace suspicion or realise they have misread a situation. Jarle wants to believe Sarah who seems reasonable and level-headed in her insinuations about Elisabeth. Sunna is physically dwarfed by everyone showing how uneven the power balance is within the school.
Armand is exciting and energetic filmmaking but Tøndel’s experimentation with form tends to sacrifice narrative coherence. There is an argument to be made that the situation Elisabeth finds herself in is irrational, so the film embraces illogical scenarios, yet that argument falters in certain areas. Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel deals in whispers and half-truths in Armand creating a psychological and ethical puzzle the audience finds themselves having to solve. Elisabeth says that no-one should look only at the surface nor dig too deep into what they see of other people. Armand the film says the same. Armand’s elisions are both strengths and weakness, but if there is a single version of the truth that can be agreed upon it is that Renate Reinsve is one of the most substantial and versatile actors of her generation.
Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit
Writer: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Producer: Andrea Berentsen Ottmar
Music: Ella van der Woude
Cinematography: Pål Ulvik Rokseth
Editor: Robert Krantz
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