QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Within the first 20 or so minutes, Fränk surveys an entire genre playlist worth of musical varieties. The Estonian film doesn’t really take mega-tonal shifts as it sonically jukes from metal to radio pop to harmonica-blues. It’s even stranger when the harmonica comes from a 14-year-old Estonian boy, Paul (Derek Leheste), who, despite the title, is the film’s main character. The harmonica is an old man’s instrument, is it not? But the sonically undefined world is a proper introduction to Paul’s new life in rural Estonia with his uncle. He is just as lost as the music in these early scenes.
Paul brings a new face to an otherwise tight-nit small town. A local group of young boys spend their free time drinking alcohol, sniffing glue, and bullying an innocent disabled man. They call him “Fränk,” short for Frankenstein, but his brother calls him Sasha (Oskar Seeman). Paul makes sorry-excuses of friends by joining them in their heckling and rock throwing. Sasha is a Russian diminutive for Alexander and his brother speaks to him in Russian. His language makes him even more of an other in a modern, anti-Russophone Estonia. It’s an incredible small touch that probably pays off even more dividends in its intended Estonian audience. Eventually, after feeling guilt for a terrible “joke,” Paul begins to spend time with Fränk and learns he is human too.
One could call Fränk a “coming-of-age” film for the simple fact that it is about a young boy maturing. But it’s only a coming-of-age film in the same way that Spongebob is a sports show just because Spongebob and Patrick occasionally catch jellyfish together. One of the can’t-miss essentials of the former’s genre is a fundamental optimism about childhood despite the tribulations. The genre often teaches us that first loves suck because they always end but they teach us about love, romance, and desire. In Fränk, first loves go unrequited and impossible. Bullying doesn’t end in words but in chemically induced near-blindness and crossbow firing. Forgiveness is rare and suicidal ideation common. There is no nostalgia for childhood here. Neither is there an optimism of what’s to come: the adults also are divided into equally populated camps of losers and abusers.
The script tempers its pessimism with an ounce of grace. And, inspiringly, that grace is delivered in near surreption and without the slightest didacticism. Paul doesn’t turn in his own bully-tormentor, Jasper (Tõru Kannimäe), when given the chance. Nor does the film make us suffer yet another violent embarrassment of Fränk when he is beaten by the group of hoodlums after being wrongfully assumed for a crime. Even Jasper’s awful and masculinity-poisoned father finds a bone of comfort under his viciousness when his boy needs it the most. The world is a cesspool, yes. But every now and then people will love you. And the grace of that love can save us.
Where director Tõnis Pill’s feature debut lets down the most is by casting the able-bodied Oskar Seeman as a disabled man. It’s not the first time Seeman has done so either. His part in Faulty Brides (Ego Kuld, 2023) occasionally called for disability drag too – and that’s one too many times to be considered an accident. I understand Estonia is a small country with an even smaller film scene, but disabled characters should be played by disabled actors whenever possible. He wears prosthetics and heavy make-up for the role, while also adopting an unintelligible (in any language) accent incapable of forming sentences; he can only utter single words like “Paul”. Fränk, unironically, begins to actually resemble the monster of Frankenstein – to both the filmmakers and the audience, despite the intended moral messaging to humanise Sasha.
The film makes its first impressions with a text warning of what’s to come, including “children disturbing the public order”, doing drugs, and more. Most viewers, self-consciously numbed to the awfulness of the world, may roll their eyes at such an opening. How bad can it really be? Is a warning really necessary? Maybe it’s just to make sure no audiences assume it’s a typical family-feature given the pleasant title and warm colors. Pill doesn’t kid though: Fränk is a dark film where children can overdose, young boys can kill each other, and where disabled men relentlessly cry from the pure evil inflicted upon them. It’s a fucked up film of the worst of children. And that utter-vileness is what makes it one of the most transfixing movies in this year’s Baltic programme.
Fränk just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
