European Films

Mun mot Mun is Björn Runge’s follow up to his internationally acclaimed Om jag vänder mig um (Daybreak) and is again a careful dissection of an apparently happy family living in the apparently carefree society that is Sweden. Unsurprisingly, such happiness is but an outer veneer thinly laid-on and through the years Scandinavian filmmakers have continued to mine this theme for all it is worth. In Mun mot mun a former alcoholic and consequently violent father (Peter Andersson) has caused his daughter to escape into drugs and bad friends even before her eighteenth birthday. Before the film opens, the father has mended his ways but daughter Vera (Sofia Westberg) is still at large. She is in fact living with her boyfriend-come-pimp Morgan (Magnus Krepper) who forces her to have sex for money so that they -- though mainly he -- can buy drugs.

The widescreen film opens with a tight shot of Vera and Morgan’s faces as he tries to force her to go to a client, and this visual motif is repeated several times in the film, most memorably when Vera’s mother Eva and a female stranger of her own age share a bed in hotel room – though not for the reasons you might suspect (echoes of Bergman's Persona abound). Though the focus is clearly on the father-daughter relationship, Runge, who also wrote the screenplay, casts his net wider and offers several subplots that mostly tie neatly into the main story, including those of Vera’s brother Joel and his new crush (who has a few problems in her own family), and Vera and Joel’s grandparents from both sides.

The film has drugs, violence, battery, prostitution, suicide and other assorted ills of society, but credit Runge’s screenplay for making them feel part of a coherent whole rather than a tick-off list of increasing improbabilities. Runge’s deft directorial hand in fact creates a whole universe that is like a Sweden that seems to exist in a parallel dimension: the houses in which the characters live all seem overly luxurious and theatrical (even a step beyond those already improbable in Daybreak), and combined with the way the camera slides through the rooms its good living commercial aspects clash so harshly with its tale of the ugliness of society that the film takes on a sometimes surreal dimension.