QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Eighteen-year-old Anastasija, short Anna (Enija Selecka) is going through a severe personal crisis. Her parents getting divorced and unniterested in how their two daughters might fare. Anna can barely count on their support. She is not certain about how to separate love from fear, so she starts seeking help from shamans, healers and fortune-tellers before landing in a milieu her parents would most certainly warn against (if they had the opportunity).

Anna’s closeted sexuality is also at play. Nobody knows that she is a lesbian apart from her best friend, who wonders why she occasionally dates men. When her girlfriend commits suicide, Anna decides to leave home. Daddy’s alcoholism makes her eager to be just anywhere else, not knowing how to cope with everything, and at the same time keeping her true identity a sećret. This emancipation comes with a few barriers. The teen is penniless and without a proper roof over head, and she has to figure out where to spend the night every single day

Her situation changes a lot after she meets the security guy who caught her shoplifting in the supermarket. At the beginning, the man proves helpful both as a confidante and the shelter-giver, but later proves to be every girl’s nightmare when he decides that it is perfectly ok to rape his unconscious protege. The scene in which he falls over her and goes on forever, even trying to “perform” and make Anna react to his brutal act, turns it into a nightmarish experience as seen from the female perspective. That’s because of the way cinematographer Martins Jurevics handled it, focusing almost only on facial expressions of both actors

The script is very strong in that regard. Anna also has to deal with unsolicited advices from random horny men who approach her at the bar with pick-up lines like: “If people don’t satisfy their needs, this leads to bigger issues.” Not even being told that she is a lesbian changes one guy’s needy attempt to score. He is fast at explaining how such things can be changed if “she practices enough”.

In its non-judgemental depiction of one teenager’s self-search trip, Ivar Tontegodevar’s dark drama Anna LOL is vaguely reminiscent of Saule Bliuvaite’s drama Toxic which won the Golden Leopard in Locarno earlier this year, and went on to bag more awards internationally. The major difference between the two films is the approach to the central characters and their personal development. It is not just the matter of different settings – rural (in Toxic) versus urban (Anna LOL). This is also a class issue (working versus middle class) and the level of disfunction within the families.

Anna LOL premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.