Motto: “Humans are given the words to hide their thoughts”
Till det som är vackert is a Swedish psychological narrative feature film starring Oscar winner Alicia Vikander. The film won 8 awards, including for best film, best direction, best screenplay, and best actress.
This is a very well-written film about how human emotions work in relationships.
Lisa Langseth as a screenwriter and director describes very well a toxic culture in which a young, beautiful woman is treated, degraded, and humiliated as an object to be consumed by an old, ugly man. Katarina, the woman in question, is required to try harder, but no matter how hard she tries, it is not enough. The film provides a 3D mirror of reality that you are able to understand in its depths if you give up judging and you choose to look beyond what people are doing to why are they doing that. The audience not understanding this will become a victim of their own mindset.
One of the dangers of playing zero-sum games (win-lose) instead of non-zero-sum games (win-win-win) sets the characters in a circle that cannot work until it breaks. The fight for control and power is tight, therefore the consequences are tragic when all boundaries are broken. The movie cleverly shows how some people may use others’ winning/towards mentality against them to make them play win-lose games that the optimistic, trustful people believe to be win-win games. Since people oriented towards results may consider whatever they consider valuable, they only get the illusion of a win. Of course, the idea of letting the power games slide by you presents the frightening perspective of giving up control, which in turn may turn you into a victim. Adam reaches a theoretical barrier that he cannot overcome because he is the one who set it there, as an intrinsic component of the win-lose game. He could have won even if he would have played a win-win game, but he didn’t make that choice. He doesn’t understand if he considers he cannot reach his interest.
Submission is obedience without respect that happens only when somebody’s spirit gets broken. An entry-level worker may feel obliged to literally dance to the music chosen by a top dog, which does not create positive emotion or elevation, but only degradation and sorrow. Sometimes, these people risk their freedom and options (as Katarina does) in order not only to maintain their own interests but also to create freedom for others. At the end of the movie, as a result of the transformative experience that Katarina went through, she proves that she has learned her lessons well from her mentor and has created a better workplace for other women as well.
Anger and fear may weaken you in a violent society. Fear has demobilized people who forget their dignity and have made themselves attackable. If one succeeds in overcoming and mastering the anger, the persecutor may be dissuaded from attacking. This raises the question: “What choice do you take when you believe that you have no choice?”
The powerful authority position that the man in the movie (Adam) has is officially one of an educator and a mentor, but he actually doesn’t take responsibility for his actions, acting only at the surface as a moral landmark. The surface seems to be enough in Swedish society (which prides itself on social equity), where things need to look nice as long as someone doesn’t expose the rotten core inside. Is it that what cannot be seen does not exist?
The principles that are exposed by the man only work when they satisfy his own interests, but when the woman is trying to use the same principles to advance her interests, then she is blamed. Illustrating the triviality of hypocrisy. Do the actions match the declared intentions? Do the actions match with the meaning their actors communicate to other people?
The film is also about conditional vs non-conditional (self-)respect. Conditional respect is the one someone earns through actions. Non-conditional respect is dignity. “How much is a human being worth?” is an offensive question in terms of dignity, as this is a non-conditional value. At the same time, dignity is composed of various aspects, not all of them being equally affectable through someone else’s behavior. Thus, actions may be committed against human dignity (as an act of private or public humiliation), but they may not take away the intrinsic value of the human being in question. In this respect, the film gets closer to the artistically superior universal masterpieces Darbareye Elly (2009) and Being John Malkovich (1999) from which it could have been inspired. This film chooses a dark, serious, and detached tone without much of a satirical stance, similar to Compliance (2012).
Katarina seems impulsive, while Adam is compulsive. They trigger each other and run the full cycle of a dramatic triangle. One would have to ask if both of them are suffering from various mental health issues before they meet or do they drive each other crazy. The same principles that set them in action are currently being used as a tool to design social engineering by creating addictive services that don’t really fulfill a need.
On the surface, this film could be superficially considered as just another feminist piece of junk Western propaganda that says that men are bad and women are good if only the observations it makes wouldn’t be universally true irrespective of gender.
My vote: 8/10
occasionally film critic
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