Tuesday, March 21, 2017

A Man Called Ove

A Man Called Ove is a feel-good Swedish comedy that sidles up to the very serious problem of unassimilating immigrants from the Middle East — and the Swedes’ increasing fear of them — then sappily slinks away, toothless.  
Ove’s community of townhouses is a miniature of the regimented Swedish welfare state. Though deposed as board chair, Ove angrily continues to enforce the regulations. Rather than helping his neighbours, Ove refuses their requests and prefers vigilante law-enforcement.  
The film’s central thrust is to discover the tragedy that created this bitter, selfish, righteous jerk. At the end, Ove not only abandons his own isolation but organizes the entire community to thwart the institutional attempt to take away his paralyzed old friend/enemy Rune.  
The flashbacks reveal Ove to have been a promising, solitary, nervous young man. He lost his mother as a boy, saw his father killed by a train while bragging about Ove’s report card and stumbled into a marriage with the beautiful, smart Sonja. A bus crash aborts their child and leaves Sonja paralyzed. When she dies of cancer, Ove is encrusted with rage.  
If Sonja seems too good a catch for the unpromising Ove, her later career as a special needs teacher suggests she intuits potential others don’t. Even Ove doesn’t know his own continuing value, as his failures at suicide reveal. Hence neighbour Parvaneh’s conclusion: “You’re amazingly crap at dying.”  
Parvaneh is the film’s crucial center: a pregnant Persian who fled Iran, married an affable but clumsy Swede and just became Ove’s neighbour. Ove initially rages against the new family’s incompetence, ignorance of the community’s laws and rowdiness. He’s warmed into accepting them. Their interchange represents traditional Sweden’s encounter with immigrants from the Middle East.  
But this immigrant is a heavily sentimentalized soft-focus version of the immigration that is rupturing Sweden. Parvaneh is the idealized immigrant, with her two lovable Persian children to thaw Ove’s heart, her tasty Persian cooking, her eagerness to join and to enjoy her new community.She's not an obvious Muslim. She's learning to drive. Director Hannes Holm’s point is that this Other, an immigrant from that very different culture, is no threat to Sweden’s traditional virtues but an opportunity for their renewal. 
This simplification undermines film’s exhortation to embrace the immigrant. Because Sweden’s threat is not from anyone like Parvanah, the domesticated, safe form of the Other, but from the violent jihadists and rapists that impose their old culture’s values instead of accepting those of their new land. So the film does not really treat with the issue as it is problematically occurring but plays it in a much simpler, easier form. In sentimentalizing the immigrant the film ignores the real issue it purports to address. 
This sentimentalizing pervades the film. As if Parvanah’s two little daughters were not enough to register Ove’s revived feeling, he first confronts and threatens, then eventually adopts and sleeps with yet another Persian — the stray cat.   
So, too, the running joke about Ove’s passionate commitment to the Saab automobile brand. That traditional value he inherited from his father. Its advantage is another metaphor for independent or stasis: its mechanism does not require the propeller rod others do. 
If brand preference is a minor difference, here it balloons. Ove clashes with his kindred Rune for preferring the Volvo. The men’s deepening hostility reflects in their graduation to higher models in their respective brands. Then Rune does the indefensible: embracing the German. When Ove rails against the German and the French cars, the film satirizes jingoism and belligerent nationalism as lightly and as safely as it did the issue of immigration. 
     This very engaging, pleasant and reassuring film is fine — except for occupying the space and time that would have been better invested in a serious treatment of the issue it cites but evades. 

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