Venue: Gala | Star and Shadow
Screenings: Monday 22nd March, 8.30pm | Wednesday 24th March, 7.30pm
Director Ruben Östlund / Sweden 2008 / 98 min
Certificate 15 / In Swedish with English Subtitles
The nature of group dynamics is explored in amusing if stinging fashion in this tragic comedy or comic tragedy. Structured like a set of interspersed, but not interconnected, short films, characters ranging from teens to the late middle age, face moral dilemmas about when to speak up or stay silent. The film is notable for its striking visual style of long takes with no cuts within the scenes. This is related to Östlund’s background as a skiing film director, where a cut would only ever indicate failure.
Tickets £4.50, call:
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Anonymous 
The main idea in Involuntary is given away in the title. The film sees a number of scenarios unfold simultaneously in which individuals find themselves in situations where they are not sure how to act and act in a way that may be seen as involuntary, or following a herd mentality rather than sticking to one’s own convictions. The scenarios themselves are are simple and can happen to anyone. A teacher sees a rowdy pupil being hit by another teacher and fails to say anything at the time, yet eventually explodes at that teacher in an inappropriate manner and goes on to suffer for this more than she had anticipated. A woman on a coach accidentally breaks a curtain rail in the toilet and thinks nothing of it, but when the driver inspects finds the broken rail he threatens to stay put until someone comes forward and confesses. The woman chooses not to come forward and the driver sticks to his guns and sits there for hours without moving, causing much aggravation among the passengers. By this point, however, it feels too late for the woman to confess – the other passengers would be angry at her for holding up their journey for so long, and so she eventually lets a young child take the blame. Maybe the problem here is in using the word ‘choose’, because it seems that this is precisely what’s absent in every scenario in this film – a moment of choice. Instead of choosing whether to come forward or not the woman seems to avoid making a choice, and by the time she feels uncomfortable about it it’s already too late. These scenarios are, after all, moral grey areas, where the lines of moral conventions are blurred, and it’s perhaps in these areas more than anywhere that a real decision is needed.
Or maybe it’s not just about not choosing, but also about choosing too hastily (involuntarily, you might say), and suddenly finding that you’ve gone further than you would have liked to, when you suddenly think “shit, how have I ended up in this situation?” But director Ruben Ostlund is also interested in group mentality. In one interview he ruminates on how, in a reunion with some old friends whom he hadn’t seen in 20 years, he found himself reverting back to the way he used to behave with them all those years ago. Is he just being dragged along by the herd, then, or is it that this group brings out his real self? In line with this emphasis on the need to make up your own mind, Ostlund adopts an unusual filming style, one which refuses to give the viewer any constructed, easy-to-follow narrative. Each scene is filmed from one angle which is not changed for the whole during, while people drift in and out of frame. Unlike most films, where the camera diverts your attention towards what the director wants you to see in order to construct a story, the viewer is left to their own devices. Strangely, however, this seems to work perfectly for what Ostlund is trying to achieve. The way the film is shot prevents the viewer to become a part of the story by substituting conventional techniques with a voyeuristic, almost objective one, and it’s here, when the actions on the screen are not framed within the normalising air of a story, that they begin to seem odd and disturbing. We see two teenage girls getting ready for a night out and taking picture after picture of themselves on the webcam, but while in most movies the two girls’ preparations would be pushed aside by a larger story around this scene, in this film we are confronted with the strangeness of the act itself – picture after picture after picture. Until the act seems as jarring as a word being sounded repeatedly.
Ultimately, however, what nails this film is how, in spite of the fact that Ostlund resists conventional story-telling methods, we find ourselves gripped by these little insignificant stories and wanting to know what’ll happen next. Suddenly our everyday actions take on the same degree of importance and interest as any story we might watch or read.
Ruben Östlund’s Involuntary (De Ofrivilliga) is built around moments where viewers are thrown in the scenes as the curious (and involuntary) outsider, as a peeping tom, to follow the stories of several separate characters. It shows the awkwardness in social situations after the point of no return when people know they’ve done wrong, but just won’t admit it. The film is about the small moral choices, standing up against peer pressure and taking responsibility.
All is built around the feeling of being an outsider. Unconventional framing, every scene is one long shot and there is literally no editing inside scenes, so the viewer is bombarded by steady flow of people’s necks, feet, hindering obstacles which prevents us from seeing the people talking in the way they are conventionally shown in films and tv, yet I still cared about the characters. They felt real. The whole film felt real. It was like watching a documentary where the film maker just puts the camera to a random place and waits for something to happen.
Maybe it is, because I’m a Finn, but I felt straight like home when watching the film. I felt joy, sorrow, shame, indifference, worry and also tiredness, as it ran just a moment too long, but overall I was living the moment. And I could visualize myself as the observing outsider, hell, I’ve even been to some of the situations happened in the film.
Involuntary didn’t feel larger than life, it felt like life. The awkward moments, cowards, egos too big, opportunities to stand up and fight, it’s all there. Definitely a refreshing cinema experience. Heja Sverige!