QUICK’ N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
The camera can take actions and words, thoughts and ideas, and magnify them in an arresting way. This is in part attributable to how cinema creates a space for us to enter the film. You can feel the closeness of the characters, giving cinema an ability to take on sensitive subjects and make them more confronting, but in a thoughtful and engaging way. German director Hille Norden takes advantage of this in her feature début, taking us inside of challenging subject material through the female gaze.
When Nore (Dana Herfurth) reconnects with former childhood friend Jonna (Luna Jordan), the pair move in together. Everything is going swimmingly, until Jonna’s boyfriend Michel (Jakob Gessner) questions Nore’s free-spirited sexual relations – men are treated as disposable objects for one-night only. Rebuffing his concerns, she says, “If it were wrong, someone would have done something”. Soon, Jonna is compelled to bring up with Nore the fact that she can’t say no to sex or men in general. This leads to a shared journey as the two friends travel into Nore’s past, uncovering a hidden trauma that lies behind the young woman‘s nymphomania.
From the opening scenes, Easy Girl brims with energy. The dialogue crackles thanks to Herfurth and Jordan’s chemistry. The sexually liberated Nore sweeps us up in her free-spirited ways, and her indifference towards men, her cutting wit, illicit a chuckle. Nore’s confident persona and carefree attitude is intoxicating, that is until fractures in our perception of this young woman appear, revealing the roots of her hyper-sexuality.
Norden’s world building does not let up on the foundations laid by its characters. The frame is full of life, acting as an extension to Nore’s persona. Norden creates juxtapositions that bleed out of her wounded character. First, that Nore looks like she has been dressed up like a doll depicts a woman now in her twenties, trapped in the past of her youth. This is important to home in on, because part of the trauma experience is being aware of the passage of time, but feeling stuck in the past when the trauma occurred. Second, if her hyper-sexuality can be explained as the brain’s response to reassert power, this is her adult-self pursuing those ends by objectifying and depriving her one-night stands any control. Beyond this, Norden and her cinematographer Bine Jankowski bring a subtle ethereal energy to the flashbacks that Nore and Jonna enter, creating a dreamlike feel. Then, there’s also the visually effective touch of the apartment stripping itself down at a transformative moment in the characters’ friendship.
Norden and Jankowski shoot the sex scenes in order to convey the contrasting experiences of sexual intercourse: the awkwardness of knowing how to communicate, find a rhythm and how to bring one another pleasure. Those scenes when Nore experiences a hyper-sexuality are shot with a rawness. These interactions are not love or affection, but sating one’s physical desire. Then, the scenes from her past are more nuanced, some appearing deceptively gentle, as we witness how the insecure Nore was shaped through coercive and harmful experiences.
Thematically, Easy Girl is a story told with maturity. Norden is not only interested in the inciting incident but the successive fallout. Easy Girl wants to enter into a conversation about how Nore’s many partners have unwittingly been part of her trauma narrative. For anyone suffering with such sentiment, there is the inherent risk of renewed trauma. There’s also the danger of the psychological and emotionally wounded person traumatising others. Easy Girl enters the crosshairs of consent, and interrogates how Nore’s consent has been coerced, for example by Felix (Campbell Caspary), an ex-boyfriend who wanted to pleasure her using a bottle of orange juice. There have been partners during her hyper-sexual phase where consent has been given by both parties. But even here, consent is murky because the motivations and expectations are not clearly defined. For some of the men, they are left feeling objectified and used, while for Nore, she’s falling deeper into a defence mechanism that might not be healthy in the longterm.
It’s important to observe that Nore is never positioned as a victim to be pitied, despite the violence perpetrated against her. In one scene she says, “I have the right to trust this world.” She doesn’t want to be seen as a victim nor does she want to be defined by the experience. Easy Girl never presents her as such, but nor does it disavow what she has been through. It is therefore disappointing Norden succumbs to an impulse to tidily resolve the story, and with a cheesy breaking of the fourth wall. It’s possible to see what the director was trying to achieve, but it comes across cavalier by simplifying, even patronising deep rooted mental health struggles.
Easy Girl just premiered in the First Feature Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
