Border: edging, delimiting, confining, border area.

Tina works at a border location, checking passengers through customs, but she does so with amazing flair. Unlike a dog trained to sniff out drugs she detects, again through her metaintuitively equipped body, guilt, sin, shame, crime; she "feels" evil.

She is a decidedly awkward woman, with a face bordering on the monstrous, very responsible and busy caring for her father who suffers from dementia.

She lives with a strange individual who engages only in pit bull racing, cheats on her and attempts sexual advances that she rejects.

Tina indulges in walks in the woods in which she lives, goes skinny-dipping, and seems comfortable when she encounters animals such as fox and moose.

One day, while working, Vore, a man with monstrous features, arrives and she sniffs his guilt although no evidence can be identified.

Something unites them strongly; they hang out, discover each other, love each other, and nothing is as it seems:

he is not a man although he looks like one and she is "not just " a woman although she is one...

Tina discovers that she is a troll just like Vore. But who is a troll?

According to mythology, they are humanoids living in the forests of northern Europe.

According to oral traditions, they are rough, hirsute creatures with a large nose and a thickly furred tail with only four fingers on each hand or foot. Two types of trolls are identified: one of gigantic size and malignant behavior and one of human size with benevolent behavior. Trolls are said to steal children from families while they sleep and put a Changeling, or a baby troll, in their bed.

Between Tina and Vore this very difference is highlighted, and although bestiality emanates from their sexual encounter along with eroticism and tenderness, they discover their common past and destiny and their unbridgeable differences.

While he makes explicit to her his relentless plan of revenge on humans she wonders if it is "human" not to want to hurt anyone.

Rather she is devoted to her work and her cause of exposing a child pornography ring in a seemingly perfect couple's Ikea-style apartment.

The second feature by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian-born Dane, Border is based on a novella by John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of the well-known Let Me In in which the message of the lost relationship between human and natural and the fruitful significance of differences was already evident.

Although the focus is on narrating human and mythological figures nothing seems more real than this film's treatment of events with photographic-cinematic quotations from compatriot Trier's Antichrist and Melancholia.

The figure of Tina is a creature bordering on human because of her body but so human because of her ethics, so differently such from all those humans who slaughtered her parents and fellow humans thus committing a mythological genocide.

The film, which is a concentrated condensation on the theme of limit, inequality, diversity and difference, reveals the boundary between Myth and Logos.

An ontology of meaning that encompasses the meonticity of Vore, bearer of Troll evil, though already a victim of human evil, and the metaonticity of Tina bearer-symbol of Troll difference.

Where the Logos does not respect all that is sacred, myth, legend, mystery, tragic, it builds the realm of inequality over which stands the tendency to consider normal what moral laziness avoids changing.

The film does not hesitate to emphasize with the magical, moving figure of Tina the fact that all too often normality translates the existing into the norm, neglecting all differences and making one savor that impossibility of transformation that is the first characteristic of this "woman," who for this, and not for anything else, becomes a special creature.

A body, hers, clumsy and awkward, in which, however, eros is still possible, because it preserves ambivalence and is not reduced to an unambiguous meaning, as it has been codified; a game of concealment and nonconcealment that does not conform to the correspondence between body and sex, in the homologating equivalence that dissolves all symbolic ambivalence.

Tina is everything, she is beyond the monovalence of a sexuality rendered by enchantment all positive: for her body is not just work as it is not just pleasure; she has retained her integrity at work where she exercises her power, and her integrity in pleasure where she does not yield to a univocal sexuality.

She is in a border zone and cannot yield to a body rendered expressionless by the denial of HER word: ambivalence.

A story that tells through Myth and therefore does not "explain" but EVOCIATES, Myth being not what one thinks but what one thinks in and from. Myth alludes, indicates, draws attention just as this film does through a mythological figure who makes something unthinkable, unspeakable, scandalous, paradoxical and for this reason UNIQUE happen.

We have unlearned to see, to hear, and in general to feel since the day science educated us to infer what we should see, hear, and feel.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice