Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel This movie was screened on Cannes Film Festival Armand Drama • 2024 • 1h 58m

(François de La Rochefoucauld)

A lone woman, Elizabeth, crosses the threshold of her son Armand’s school, urgently summoned by an alarm that rejects clarity and chooses the unspoken. She is greeted by Sunna, a young teacher still unaware of the vertigo awaiting her. The superiors, lost in the fog of their own incompetence, assign her the task of managing the unspeakable, without tools or horizons. Thus begins the slow crumbling of reality: a world where complexity is reduced to formulas, where the truth is manipulated until it becomes both weapon and caricature.

 

In the gray, deserted classrooms of this soulless building, events take on an ambiguous form. The corridors, as deserted as certain memories are, fill with omens: alarms that go off for no reason, administrators bleeding from the nose, as if the body itself were rebelling, expressing through the hemorrhage what the mind can no longer contain. A sort of epistemic unconscious: reality filters through the body when the mind fails to understand. In this scenario, the narrative detaches itself from realism and plunges into the sea of the surreal. Director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, grandson of the great Bergman, seems more focused on chasing ancestral shadows than digging into the living bodies of his characters.

 

The story begins with an accusation: Jon’s parents, Armand’s companion, raise allegations of violence and darkness. Elizabeth knows this family well; she knows that her son could not have said or done what they accuse him of. Yet the informal tribunal forming against her grants her no voice: a lone mother, against the unyielding authority of the couple. The asymmetry of power is embodied in the bodies, the silences, the very space that separates them. Reinsve, a subtle interpreter, conveys with her mere breath the despair of someone forced to defend themselves in a trial where the verdict is already written.

 

But instead of remaining anchored to the human conflict, the film plunges into a symbolic labyrinth. The corridors multiply, the dialogues break into fragments that no longer seek understanding. Questions creep in: Was Armand trying to communicate an older pain? Had his father, who died under mysterious circumstances, left behind wounds deeper than words? Or is all of this merely the distorted reflection of unspeakable fears?

 

The attempt to make sense of it shatters against Tøndel's desire to transcend flesh and chase abstraction. Elizabeth’s laughter, hysterical and interminable, manifests as a paradoxical reaction to the hypocritical gazes of the adults, a desperate antidote to the lie. She laughs not to diminish but to demolish the framework of falsehood surrounding her. It seems to show that the situation has become so absurd that the only way not to collapse is to laugh. However, the way it is shot draws too much attention to itself – the characters do not react to the crisis of laughter as real people would – breaking any emotional connection with Elizabeth, Sarah, or even the unseen Armand. And Tøndel never truly recovers. Then she cries, like an actress overturning expectations, taking the drama beyond the threshold of representation: she shocks those present, disarms them.

 

More recognizable humanity is needed at the heart of *Armand* than Tøndel seems interested in providing; some scenes become interminable and even irritating for the viewer.

 

From there, *Armand* becomes even stranger: Elizabeth embarks on a sort of interpretive dance with a ghostly janitor; she crosses paths with Anders in an opaque and impersonal classroom. Every gesture, every movement, becomes a fragment of a reality imploding under the weight of its own lies. Yet, despite the ambition to tear through the veil of the everyday, the film ends up hiding more than it reveals.

 

We don’t know what lies behind the closed doors of friends and neighbors, not even those who occasionally care for our children. And when those shadows emerge into the light, we are remarkably incapable of handling them with sensitivity. It's an ambitious theme for a debut director, and Tøndel loses control. Rather than embodying the truth, *Armand* takes refuge in an aesthetic claustrophobia, at times even misogynistic, and in its more self-indulgent drifts, it becomes tragically pretentious, even ridiculous, culminating in a final explanatory moment that sterilizes any tension.

 

Elizabeth, in her solitary struggle against hypocrisy, stands as an anti-rhetorical figure, as a living denial of respectability and the instrumentalization of pain. Yet, what could have been the film’s soul-rending core dissolves in a narrative structure that irritates and misleads, preferring to construct an appearance of depth rather than truly delving into the wounds it claims to explore. *Armand* attempts to say something about the impossibility of knowing the other, about our clumsy inability to confront the evil that inhabits the rooms next door. But in its eagerness for monumentality, the film betrays its own material: more in love with the cultural heritage it comes from than with the raw flesh of its characters, it remains suspended, like an incomplete echo in the void.

 

The film betrays itself, exposes its sheer pretentiousness: it uses a story that could have been necessary only as an excuse, as a springboard for stylistic indulgence, intellectual ostentation, without ever truly honoring the depth of the theme it stages. The music is incredibly interesting; in the closing credits, with Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free by David Hermon and Étienne Jaumet, the film sheds any pretense: it surrenders to the limit, to failure, to the irreparable silence of things.

 

(Michel de Montaigne)