Pippi Longstocking is born in ‘Becoming Astrid’
Pippi Longstocking was anything but ordinary. The red-haired heroine of Swedish children’s literature took on the world with superhuman strength and unbridled imagination, with no parents to tell her what to do.
Her creator, Astrid Lindgren, also lived a life less ordinary, shoved off the socially prescribed path to adulthood by a young pregnancy out of wedlock. It’s an origin story that makes her rise to prominence as a beloved children’s literary figure all the more remarkable.
Refreshingly, “Becoming Astrid” isn’t about how Pippi Longstocking came to be – at least, not directly. Rather, it’s about how the woman who created Pippi Longstocking came to be.
This is not a flat and lifeless biopic in which a creation loses a bit of its wonder in the dissection of its inspiration. “Becoming Astrid” sidesteps that pitfall by focusing on the writer’s painful passage into womanhood, telling an intimate and unhurried story of quiet triumph over pain.
Actress Alba August is by turns luminous and sorrowful as Astrid, at the story’s start not yet a world-famous writer but a 16-year-old Swedish farm girl in
‘Becoming Astrid’
Great Fair Pernille Fischer Christensen. Alba August, Henrik Rafaelsen. Not rated. At Harkins Shea. Bad Good Bomb
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long, braided pigtails. The product of a rigid household presided over by a strict, godly mother, Astrid bristles at the restrictions, aching for selfexpression.
Her keen mind and sharp tongue find an outlet through an internship at a local newspaper. There, she develops her nascent storytelling skills and blossoms into a young woman. When she trades in her pigtails for a fashionable bob, the writing’s all but on the wall, the affair with her boss inevitable.
Her unhappily married editor, Blomberg (Henrik Rafaelsen), is immediately taken with Astrid’s youth and intelligence. But though his marriage is dead in spirit, it lives in law. Astrid’s resulting pregnancy is far more than an inconvenience: It could land Blomberg in jail for adultery. She finds little more succor at home, where her sin threatens to rain shame down on her family.
Still a child herself, Astrid is forced to leave home before she begins to show. Shortly after giving birth, she must return home for Christmas, lest the townspeople begin to gossip. She leaves her baby behind, painfully binding her breasts to stop them from producing milk. The charade is every bit as taxing as the heartache.
Though “Becoming Astrid” is unflinching in its depictions of Astrid’s pain, it does not wallow. Even Blomberg, the noncommittal adulterer who upends Astrid’s life, is depicted in three dimensions; his heart, too, seems broken by what he cannot have, what he cannot be.
Beneath all those guarded emotions and soft lighting is a wellspring of Nordic strength and resilience, captured gracefully by the women on screen and behind the camera. “Becoming Astrid” is a nuanced character study that makes sense of the unconventional and mighty heroine that followed. It’s no mystery, by the end, how Astrid grew to be a woman capable of writing stories that help children feel brave.