We Are the Best!

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Lukas Moodysson Starring: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne

Swedish cinema in a Summer of Hollywood blockbusters is a strange sight, but hardly an unwelcome one.
Lukas' Moodysson's We Are the Best! takes place in Stockholm, early 1980s'. Two young Swedish friends named Klara and Bobo, are dissatisfied with their parents and home-lives, which they find uncool. Both love punk rock and sport hairstyles to match their musical taste. The girls are social outcasts and are mostly ridiculed at school but what they have is each other. When Klara (Mira Grosin), the feistier of the two, hears some vexing rock music blaring from a youth center, she and Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) barge into the place, demanding equal time to practice their music. The problem is, their band is non-existent though they don't divulge that crucial fact. The band they heard, made up of older guys, are miffed that the girls demand time for themselves but the men organizing the center grant them a weekly time-slot.

Unable to play a single note, Klara and Bobo wield their instruments incompetently but manage to make noise suitable to their punk taste. Klara, ever the leader and the provocateur, begins fashioning lyrics about her disdain for authority figures, like their gym teacher, who forces the unathletic duo to participate in team sports.

Bobo contends with a home-life with a mother who seems to be drawn to every man who is wrong for her while her father is mostly absent from her life. Klara has little patience for her family, who often barge into the her room where the girl's brain-storm lyrics for their songs, insisting they accompany them musically. Her father comically employs a clarinet; an instrument incongruously un-punk. Though the girls improve with repeated jamming sessions, their music remains very raw.

One day they see a classmate perform a classical guitar piece in a school talent show. Though her talent is conspicuous, Klara hates the classical piece, but the booing the girl endures strikes a sympathetic chord with the girls. They approach her the next day at lunch and strike up a friendship. They learn her name is Hedvig (Liv Lemoyne) and eventually recruit her not only into their misfit outfit, but also into their band.

Hedvig is as much an outcast as Klara and Bobo. It isn't long before the girls, while dining with Hedvig's family one night, decide to punk-ify Hedvig's long, plain hairstyle. It is startling to see the transformation, as if Hedvig's former identity is lost in the new coif.
With Hedvig's musical guidance, the band's sound slowly evolves from the discordant to more palatable noise.

As the girl's rebellious streak runs deeper, they begin to show more signs of social mischief, if not disobediance. Hedvig, the reserved voice of reason in the friendship, eventually embraces Bobo and Klara's punkish ethos. One school cafeteria lunch degenerates into a food-fight between the girls as their perplexed schoolmates look on.
As boys become a fact of life, Klara and Bobo's friendship becomes frayed when the two fall for the same boy, which calls for Hedvig to intervene and restore order.

The film is very much driven by the performances of the actors, who are superb in what sometimes seem improvisatory scenes. The girl's impending musical performance is a vague destination in the film while their growth as true rebels--the kind the boy rock band in the film could only dream of being--progresses to disruptive acts. We see the girls in the final credits upsetting patrons in a fast-food establishment by climbing into a large, cardboard box while an angry manager and staff person forcefully remove the girls from the premises. It is apparent the scene is real; the girls unleash their characters on an unsuspecting crowd.

The three girls call to mind the Russian punk-performance band Pussy Riot, which is most likely Moodysson's intention. Punk music is only one weapon in the girl's arsenal of anti-social expressions and the more they act out, the more society seems staid and conformist. When the girls are booed and targeted with projectiles during a performance, they defiantly proclaim they are the best, as the title suggests. It is a good thing art can still imitate life; it would be a sadder world if humanity were free of people like Klara, Bobo and Hedvig roaming the planet, protesting major and minor injustices. And the world of cinema would be sadder if it didn't remind us sometimes that rebelliousness can still find expression in a world where everyone seems to be intoxicated with hand-held devices and the hyper-ephemerality of the internet.