In Halfdan Ullman Tøndel’s single-location psychodrama Armand, the titular character is both an elephant in the room and a structuring absence from it. The six-year-old boy has been accused of beating, bullying, and threatening to sodomize his classmate Jon — yes, you read that right. Their baffled teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) summons Armand’s mother Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve) for a discussion with Jon’s parents Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), which she will attempt to mediate. Sunna is in over her head, caught in a no-win scenario with both hands tied behind her back. Her boss, the headmaster Jarle (Øystein Røger), is mostly looking out for the school’s interests, and wants the dispute resolved without involving any authorities.
It’s a dreary, sweltering early summer day, and within the forbidding geometry of this Norwegian primary school, the adults are talking — and talking, and talking. Though they periodically recess in an effort to deflate the situation’s palpable tensions, these breaks allow for furtive asides where the characters hash out the offscreen histories of the parties concerned; Sarah and Elisbaeth are actually in-laws, the former’s brother Thomas was the latter’s abusive (and recently deceased) husband, and Armand may have been reenacting the violence he witnessed his father commit. Such revelations are meted out through Armand’s distended two-hour runtime like breadcrumbs of intrigue, leading inevitably back to the classroom-cum-courtroom where the parents and teachers, and later the administrators, haggle and handwring in tedious circles.
The film is deliberately composed of all the things Tøndel’s camera declines to see, and the human contradictions that heated words cannot properly reconcile or grasp. But this strategy also renders his characters’ emotions distanced and abstract, even before the film makes multiple symbolic detours. Reinsve’s performance is positioned as a tuning fork for the story’s many ambiguities — though she’s an incredibly skilled actress who’s up to the task, Armand seems equally determined to wriggle away from the emotional center she’s working to provide. Elisabeth is an actress, and this profession is held against her in myriad ways by her calculating sister-in-law, who questions not only her ways of life, but her ways of behaving and being. Elisabeth’s erratic and reckless mannerisms throughout the film make her an unstable figure of identification, but Reinsve sells both her sincerity and mounting psychosis in a way that honors an actor’s instinctive tendency to embody their every emotion to the maximum. These vast wells of feeling are arresting in fits and starts, but they never quite square with Tøndel’s constricting style and cryptic dramatic shorthand.
The film that emerges is as mulishly unpleasant and rigorously composed as anything Tøndel’s grandfather Ingmar Bergman made, with a similar attention to gestures both minutely physical and grandly abstract. Armand’s elusive nature, however, feels more like a cheat code for profundity; it probes these issues of family and bureaucracy with the same invasive and incurious grasp as the hands that claw at Elisabeth in a climactic hallucination. Though Tøndel’s imagery builds to some formidable crescendos, they arrive too late for any meaningful catharsis or anticlimax to take effect. By connecting some, but not all, of the story’s disparate dots, the final stretch’s half-learned revelations and left-field power reversals are robbed of their impact. Armand depicts a sensational scenario but buries those sensations in italics and quotation marks; what little it has to say in the first place is muted to a teasing whisper.
DIRECTOR: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel; CAST: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Øystein Røger, Endre Hellestveit; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: February 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
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