I'd seen "You, The Living" a few months back. I felt it was a quirky film, with characters only the director would understand. It really limited itself to a small audience.
The film, however, was a straight forward love story, with an authentic Sweden set during the summer of 1970. I kept questioning how old the characters were due to the young faces, yet excessive amount of smoking.
Teenage film, when it actually involves the teenage years rather then the stuff dubbed "teenage film" at the moment, is able to craft a realistic portrayal of the obligatory naivety of the teenage characters, to show their flaws, mistakes, and misunderstandings of the adult world they're shortly going to enter. This film manages to do this, and thrives with the unique cultural setting, and overall charm of the male and female lovers. An interesting aspect of the film is that there isn't much dialogue between the couple, which allows for the scenes and actions in the story to highlight the youthful emotions at play and genuine clumsiness of their character.
It's not a film I can praise highly with artistic or philosophical merit, but one I can praise for pure enjoyment value, it's portrayal of innocence, and it's flawless creation. I don't think there was a filler scene, or underdevelopment. Cinematography was spot on for the overall theme, the scene under the rail tracks and away from the moped gang was especially authentic and wasn't beyond the scope of the film.
The film ends fairly strangely. The lover's parents have a merry gathering, hosted by the parents that live in the country, and we see the clash of the parents with the rocky marriage who live in the city. I didn't understand the city-country perspective in this film, feeling it was drifting away from the mere love story it was portraying so well, almost as if the director wanted to fill in some time, or say more. Without detailing this stage of the plot, this was the directory's attempt to make a comparison between the perplexities and struggles of adult life, but ends abruptly without having anything concrete to think about after the viewing. This look at parental differences of the young couple relates back to their "youthful emotion", but by this time the plot hasn't naturally lead into this direction, which allowed the film to spiral into a different direction, for better or worse.
Fortunately, it was more of the better that allows me to conclude that, overall, this is a good film, with a questionable inclusion of plot direction that steers away from what we expect in the love story, but one that does not impair the quality and feel of the film, but, for me, adds a genuine interest and matter of discussion afterwards, and allows this work to stand as something far more unique than the average drama romance.
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