In this year’s Warsaw Film Festival official selection, two films from Scandinavian countries—Denmark and Sweden—directed their gaze towards the migrant population. Both The Charmer (2017) and A Hustler’s Diary (Måste gitt, 2017) were awarded at the festival, the first receiving the Competition 1-2 Award and the latter the Audience Award for feature films.
Milad Alami, born in Iran, but residing in Sweden since childhood, dedicated his debut feature to the Iranian migrants in Denmark. Esmail (Ardalan Esmail), the charmer of the title, is first presented as a secretive character, and only slowly do we truly get acquainted with him. Casually drinking whiskey alone while wearing a fancy suit in what seems to be one of the poshest bars in Copenhagen, Esmail is not aspiring for a girlfriend, but for a residence permit. Yet the only way to get it is by moving in with a Danish girlfriend. The motif of the chase for a paper marriage, used in several films before, usually goes hand in hand with the light-hearted romantic comedy genre. The Charmer, however, dwells in the territory of a slow-burn drama that gradually reveals the desperation of an individual trying to conform to the asylum laws against all odds.
If Esmail woos women in order not to get deported back to Iran, the exploitation in the film works both ways. He may only be interested in the papers needed, but the women as well tend to use him as an exotic one-night sex toy. The Charmer is above all character-driven. We follow Esmail feeling more and more distressed in his calculations while muted colours and claustrophobic visuals paint the mood of a psychological thriller. The discrepancy between his everyday work as an illegal worker for a moving company—contacting his family in Iran through a lousy internet connection that is usually too bad for them to form whole sentences—and then putting on a smiling face whenever going out to meet women, reaches the point of Esmail experiencing panic attacks at several occasions.
Another dimension enters his life when meeting Sarah (Soho Rezanejad), a second-generation Iranian from a well-respected family of the Iranian Danish diaspora. The two get involved in a romantic fling, but it is soon clear that there are immense class differences between Iranians with and Iranians without a legal status. Moreover, the old Persian community does not seem to be unprejudiced towards the newcomers. The film is quite humorous at points, but then again very much down to earth, which, together with Esmail being portrayed through a complex range of emotions, allows it to be an audience-pleaser that also manages to tackle topics such as racism, class, and otherness in general. The film avoids any obvious political statements, but even the character portrayal alone offers an in-depth understanding of what being a migrant can mean for an individual.
Similarly, A Hustler’s Diary by Ivica Zubak, born in Croatia but living in Sweden, deals with the second generation of migrants in Stockholm’s Jordbro suburbs. Offering an equal share of comedy and drama, the film focuses on a young Turkish man, Metin (Can Demirtas), involved in a petty crime business of selling forged luxury brand watches. Surely a Nordic example of “cinéma de banlieue,” A Hustler’s Diary takes on a much lighter tone than Mathieu Kassovitz’s cult movie La Haine (1995). The film balances bleached-out visuals and the social realism of everyday violence and social issues with Metin’s comic-book like voiceover narration accompanied by upbeat Turkish electronics. It kicks off with Metin losing his diary, or “the book,” as he calls it, which he fills with scribbled accounts of everyday criminal episodes, incidents from his suburb community, as well as quirky self-reflection on the life he is leading.
Metin has a plan, and that is to drop the gangster shoes and become an actor. But the plan falls flat when his audition at an acting school goes awry—so much so, that he does not notice his diary falling out of his jacket when rushing out of the audition hall. Having realized that the diary is gone, he starts panicking because the notes are full of names of people involved in criminal activity and wherever it happens to end up, that certainly means trouble for him.
With Metin’s paranoia kicking in, he receives a call from one of the professors at the audition, saying that she found the diary and gave it to her husband, who happens to be a publisher and would like to make a book deal with him. What ensues is a number of dramatic turns that force Metin to change his ways—to a certain degree. Metin’s meeting with the upper-middle-class Swedish cultural scene is portrayed humorously, yet with valuable insights into the prejudices on both sides. Still, the bridging of the two realities seems to trouble Metin more than anything else, meaning that his anxious refusal to conform to the newfound talent and recognition works as an act of self-preservation. For him, the main authority remains the underground community court led by a number of Turkish elders, a group to which his late father also belonged. Metin’s memory of his father functions as the frame story of the film, since he told Metin in his childhood that in a lifetime, a man must plant a tree, raise a child, and write a book.
A Hustler’s Diary ends on a humorous note and does so quite unconventionally. But while the inventive humor and the well-paced rhythm gain the viewers’ attention from the first minutes of the film, it is definitely the social commentary and the layered portrayal of the otherness still felt by the migrants of the second generation that add extra value to this film. Both these approaches, of A Hustler’s Diary and of The Charmer, are very dynamic and seem fresh in refusing to put migrant stories in any kind of one-dimensional box, and moreover, by avoiding the victimization that often overwhelms similar narratives.
Petra Meterc
© FIPRESCI