“Armand” Review

The world of parents and teachers is painted with thick claustrophobia in Armand. The inciting incident is in regards to the titular six-year-old boy having been accused of raping his classmate. We never see the incident or the kids until the very end of the film. The majority of the picture is locked within the dull halls of a Norweigan grade school, looking and feeling like a dismal relic of the past. It’s a chamber drama so drowned in its own dreariness that it often tries to claw itself out with acts of sex, violence, and even dance.

The film isn’t so much about Armand as it is about his mother, Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve). She’s a frustrated mess with a lot of baggage, marching in with plenty of scoffs at the accusations. The defending parents are Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), doing their best not to point out the shortcomings of Elisabeth’s past. The conference does not go well as the struggling Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) can’t make ends meet about handling the situation. Elisabeth defends Armand, not convinced that he’d openly state he would penetrate somebody while using the word anal.

More information is revealed, but only in bits and pieces and never in ongoing conversations. Multiple breaks are taken when things get heated, but the rumors only fester further. Trips to the bathroom lead to confessions and allegiences. Hallway banter leads to Anders trying to convince other teachers that Elisabeth is an unfit mother. Sunna’s frustrations brings on an info dump to another teacher, as the discussion spreads further. The pattern starts becoming more monotonous than any parent-teacher conference I’ve ever experienced, darting between debates of who was at fault and two-person whispers of gossip.

The boredom takes hold with the diversions sought out by the characters. Elisabeth gets so lost within her head that she starts prancing around the hallways with dance moves that later morph into an interpretive dance of her struggles. Her uncertainty explodes with laughter that feels less like a descent into madness and more like a sudden case of the giggles. Matters get really soapy when Sarah and Anders secretly meet in an empty classroom with the projector on. They make confessions of the lies they have spun and talk about horny they are, desiring to fuck right there on the desks. It’d be a kinky scene if only this film had the guts to find a progression instead of smearing nearly everything it attempts.

Armand stumbles around in its bleak corridors in hopes of finding something more than a scattershot mess of the avant-garde. There is something to be said of how adults get lost in their own muck of melodrama that is juxtaposed by the empty school. Instead of highlighting that disconnect of adolesence versus adulthood, this picture gets so lost in its own head that it fails to be introspective or provocative with its artful boiling of sorted affairs. One can feel the longing of Elisabeth to just break from routine and dance in the hallways or laugh at the scrutinizing administration. Who wouldn’t want to break into hysterics while being trapped in this gray-drenched interior? If only those acts didn’t feel like killing time.