The fickleness of being a teenager
Actors’ raw emotion makes up for a lack of an overarching vision in ‘Beautiful Beings.’
In much the way you’re never really prepared for the bursts of violence and abuse in the Icelandic drama “Beautiful Beings,” about a quartet of wayward teenage boys from broken homes, you’re also shocked by their moments of tenderness toward each other, like the strange flower nestled in cracked pavement that both beautifies and intensifies its unlikely location.
Such is the seesawing mood of hair-trigger adolescent sensitivity — to smash, or to cry — that writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson seeks to explore with his mostly arresting second film, which is also his second feature about the inner lives of kids (2016’s “Heartstone”). An often tense release-valve scenario flecked with moments of dream imagery and lyrical naturalism, “Beautiful Beings” certainly positions Gudmundsson as one of the more thoughtful chroniclers of the awkward age, even if he never quite knows how to corral his many moods into something wholly resonant about the nihilistic trap of delinquency. (The film was Iceland’s submission this year for the international film Oscar but didn’t make the shortlist.)
Narrating our way in is Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), a sharp-eyed, wiry blond who runs in a misfit trio that includes goofy, bratty Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) and hotheaded hooligan-in-training Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson), whose go-to reaction is punching. After seeing a news report about a relentlessly bullied schoolmate recovering from an assault, Addi finds himself drawn to said kid, Baldur (Áskell Einar Pálmason), introduced to us separately as a scrawny loner living in squalor with an often-absent mother (Ísgerdur Gunnarsdóttir). To the astonishment of his mates, Addi invites “Balli” to hang with them.
It could be out of boredom, or because even a pathetic outcast’s parent-less pigsty is a better place to congregate than their own undesirable homes — and nervous, jittery Balli endures plenty humiliation from the others before he feels comfortable. But we sense Addi is at a stage where an extended gesture of potential friendship is of greater interest to him than getting into one more bloody scrap with other kids (usually spurred by Konni’s terrifying behavior). Besides, after years of rolling his eyes at the clairvoyant ramblings of his attentive but mentally troubled single mom (Aníta Briem), Addi has begun having his own strange visions: a dream of domestic peace, or a glimpse at the future’s potential violence, but sometimes just an ominous black smoke lurking in the corner.
The supernatural interludes aren’t nearly as effective, however, as the more thickly present scenes of hormonal restlessness and intuitive socialization: shared cigarettes, stupid humor, lit fuses that are better off extinguished (there are some gnarly, pulse-quickening melees), and those moments of affection — helping Balli look presentable, calming Konni — that suggest they’re inching toward figuring something out about the cusp of adulthood.
The pacing is sometimes shaggy, and the boys’ motivations are occasionally mysterious, but Gudmundsson’s young actors are magnetic in a physical, haunted way, and the talented Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen finds a dankness of texture and color that punctuates everything from sweat and light on pasty skin to the general grey/green gloom of the boys’ neighborhood.
As for how Gudmundsson handles the story’s more brutal turns, it’s hard not to sense the whiff of trauma as sensationalistic, even if the performances (especially Benediktsson’s and Pálmason’s) are solid enough to do the necessary heavy lifting. Some cruelties in wretched lives don’t need explicitness for us to grasp their impact. And in the case of the reappearance of Balli’s abusive stepfather Svenni (a commanding Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), which shakes up the molecules in that house and among the boys, a deterministic plotting regrettably takes over in the last halfhour. Until that point, “Beautiful Beings” and its unhurried atmosphere of caring realism had been doing quite well without it.