I once had to interview Saffron Burrows about a movie she’d just made with her then-partner, Mike Figgis. All she wanted to talk about was this gay teen romance. Quite right, too. Apologies to Figgis, but The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a forgotten film that deserves to stay buried – the opposite is true of Lukas Moodysson’s 1998 debut.
In small-town Sweden, studious, lonely, middle-class Agnes (Rebecka Liljeberg; fantabulously pensive), has pictures of Touch of Evil’s Hank Quinlan on her wall. And Morrissey. The woman of her dreams is 14-year-old blonde-bombshell, Elin (Alexandra Dahlstrom; gobsmackingly charismatic), who is actually a natural born feminist with a flaky streak.
At first, it seems impossible that the worlds of these girls will collide. Elin treats Agnes so badly, in fact, that a distraught Agnes self-harms. Next thing you know, they’re in a car snogging to Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is.
The emotional turbulence that follows makes complete sense. As does the behaviour of the kids at school.
Anyone who thinks Sweden contains nothing but sensitive intellectuals having conversations with god and/or spiders should be forced to see Show Me Love. I re-watched it with my 15-year-old daughter and she noted, approvingly, that the pupils at Agnes and Elin’s school resembled the ones in a 1997 Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode called The Pack. Moodysson’s characters don’t exactly eat people alive, but when they get the taste for blood they are scary.
What’s astonishing, though, is that we wind up identifying with them anyway. A fumbling stooge. A girl in a wheelchair who – unlike so many physically-challenged characters in books and movies – is neither saintly or plucky. These flawed humans all make an indelible impression.
The adults are perfectly drawn, too. Elin’s mum, Birgitta (Jill Ung), is a stoic bundle of self-doubt. Elin’s fear is that when she grows up, she’ll have kids with a man who leaves her “for someone prettier”, a line that tells us so much about the household she’s grown up in.
Moodysson went on to make other brilliant films (including another coming of age gem, We Are The Best!). For whatever reason, his lead actors did not become household names. Liljeberg is now a paediatrician; Dahlstrom does a bit of acting, but nothing major.
When Elin says she wants to a famous actress, her worldly older sister rolls her eyes and says, “You’re too short!” Small things often get overlooked. But not in Show Me Love.
