A soccer field viewed from afar, a body is on the ground, people move around excitedly, no sound, someone runs after a girl, stops her, talks to her, nothing can be heard.

Blood was coming out of his ears, which is not a good sign; shortly after, it is learned: the boy is dead.

The boy is Jamie, the son of a right-wing politician.

He was allegedly hit by Lykke, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Labour politician.

From here begins the long, mysterious, and insinuating tale by Dag Johan Haugerud, who identifies and portrays, indicates and hides, shows and conceals.

Lykke supposedly hit Jamie with her backpack, causing him to suffer a cerebral hemorrhage: but why?

The intricate narrative construction involves teachers, none of whom were present during the incident, and the families.

Political clues, conflicting versions, media strategies; is there violence in school? Who is responsible for what happened? Social services for Lykke? Who was supposed to supervise? Why weren't they there?

Guilt spreads among teachers and parents; discussions about aggression and the inability to distance oneself from the one who killed or possibly caused the death arise.

Were the safety protocols followed? Some suggest that there is bullying and provocations of all kinds among the kids. Should a memorial page be published on Facebook for Jamie? Is it worse if a child or an adult dies?

Family dynamics; couple dynamics; parental, professional dynamics, even though the case will be archived because she is a child and cannot be prosecuted; but this still keeps her in a state of guilt.

The children's home can be a help.

No one highlighted that Jamie was the best, even at soccer; the presence of 50 different nationalities at school tended to level rather than differentiate: a matter of school policies.

Gender differences seem better tolerated than those identifying the right and the left in an elementary scheme based on more or less mutual prejudice.

The professional role of the teacher is continually exposed to the doubt whether it is more appropriate to downplay or draw the boundary, the limit through the application of disciplinary action in the face of student provocations.

What difference emerges between adult and child behavior; how much do adults lie to themselves in their relationship with their children; how much do teachers understand and determine the relationship that is established between them and the students.

The Oslo neighborhood where the dramatic event occurs becomes a simple microcosm/pretext to focus attention on an endless series of reflections.

Events, rules, conflicts, complexities, prejudices intertwine to be resolved in a gaze, the child's gaze, more articulate than expected; simpler than supposed; more sophisticated than presumed.

The child's eye becomes a gaze that exposes the inherent human intolerance to assume responsibility; an inability to observe one's improvised assumption of pre-established roles.

The initial images, without sound, become, over the course of 157 minutes, increasingly eloquent and disturbing.

The film's objective is not really to understand what actually happened but to put under the lens of careful observation the reactions of the people revolving around the event, as in the unsettling films of Swedish director Ostlund; reactions that introduce chaos into an order made of conventional rules, roles, procedures that immediately fall into crisis in the face of unpredictable events.

Especially where those environments represented by school and family, improperly considered safeguarded, are affected, the problem becomes how to investigate those hyper-protective social constructs that hinder the identification of children's true identity.

The real issue seems to be the one posed by the original title of the film "BARN" which simply means "children," that multitude of adults needing to remove any shadow that obscures the necessity to clearly distinguish good from evil.

The centrality of the pleasure principle's chaos in children compared to the rigidity of the reality principle in adults seems an evident necessity of the narrative.

The film immerses us in a psycho-pedagogical slice of life from which it is impossible to distance oneself because it represents the portrait of a more or less educational reality of contemporary Western society.

The focus is on emphasizing through rich discussion and argumentation of existential themes and through careful scene management, including the unsettling encounter between the thirteen-year-old Lykke and Jamie's father, the continuous exchange of child/adult – adult/child roles. The role-playing is highlighted by the central theme of the film, parent/child, teacher/student, constantly facing the arduous, at times desperate, attempt to educate to become adults, especially when the indispensable distance between roles becomes increasingly thinner.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice