European Films

Made by a team of enthusiastic youngsters with very little actual film experience, the Swedish drama Babylonsjukan (Babylon’s Disease) is a refreshingly stylish film about the people they were -- or at least knew -- not so many years ago. For director Daniel Espinosa this is his feature film debut; Espinosa and cinematographer Camilla Hjelm had worked on a short film together, and Hjelm was also involved in two documentaries and some TV-work. Together with the somewhat more experienced editor Morten Højbjerg (he edited the documentary about the cinematic acrobatics of Danish masters Leth and von Trier called De fem benspænd/The Five Obstructions) they show us their mastery of the cinematic language; Babylonsjukan is their story about real people told in the language of film.

 

The story follows twenty-year-old fastfood employee Maja (Nina Wähä, in her feature debut) who has to move when her boyfriend Olle (Gustaf Skarsgård) goes to India for six months. She finally finds a place to sleep in the kitchen of a friend of Olle’s called Mattias (Kalled Mustonen, also in his feature debut). At first it seems like one of the worst decisions of her life; friends of Matthias are constantly barging in on her sleeping place if they are not having a loud party in the living room just behind the paper-thin partition wall. But as her appreciation for the lovable, funny and crazy Mattias grows, she discovers that she might be the only person who does not have a plan for life. Even her blonde bisexual friend Pållan (Paulina Hawliczek) -- who at first sight just seems to confirm the dumb blonde cliché -- reveals to be more knowledgeable about life than Maja herself.

 

Maja’s newfound friends are “no global” anti-consumerists and have participated in several protests that turned violently ugly. Mattias says he suffers from the titular Babylon’s disease, an illness that only hits people in the Occident as it is caused by the situation of the Western consumerist economy and its need to drug people into believing that revolting against the system is useless. Perhaps our friends are not aware of any direct solution, but it is certain that they know that some sort of action must be taken, however absurd or drastic.  

 

Screenwriter Clara Fröberg does not develop her characters fully but rather gives us glimpses into their being through little snippets of dialogue about their views, their fears and their desires. The people that populate Babylonsjukan feel honest and true and even when their actions do not always make sense, these people are real rather than the product of a crash course in screenwriting.  Espinosa reinforces this idea of the real world with his use of footage from security cameras as well as some handheld digital cinematography.

 

To avoid straying into faux-documentary territory, Espinosa and his cinematographer Hjelm have picked their footage carefully, have lit it properly and have adjusted contrasts and colours digitally in post-production to create a visual coherence that is a joy to watch. These filmmaking youngsters have both a knack for the real world and the artificial world of film and Babylonsjukan is their first love letter to both.

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