Swedish director Josef Fares, still most well-known for his comedies Jalla! Jalla! and Kopps, moves into Susanne Bier territory for his new film Leo, which screens in the Panorama section here at the Berlinale. Though the film starts off strong, it comes apart much like its title character, a 30-year-old cook who tries to overcome his grief by shooting the man responsible for his girlfriend’s death. Nevertheless, especially the first hour is a promising debut in full-out Scandinavian drama for the director after his first try at something more dramatic with his displaced children’s tale Zozo. Actor Leonard Telfelt gives a finely tuned performance as the title character, though acting by the director himself and his Zozo assistant director Shahab Silehi -- who play Leo’s best friends and, later, accomplices -- is also worthy of notice.

 

Before moving to Hollywood to make Things We Lost in the Fire, Danish director Susanne Bier (Elsker dig for evigt / Open Hearts, Efter Brylluppet / After the Wedding) made thoughtful and intense Danish dramas that looked at big and often weighty issues and happenings in the lives of her characters without tipping over into melodrama. Now just across the Kattegat, Josef Fares tries his hand at something similar, down to the obsession of Bier’s camera with her actors’ eyeballs.

 

For the first hour of the film, in which Leo loses his girlfriend Amanda (Sara Edberg) after the couple are the victims of a random act of violence on the way home from his birthday party, Leo quickly establishes the relationships between Leo and Amanda on the one hand and Leo and his friends Josef and Shahab on the other. Fares, who also wrote and edited the film, wastes nary a shot and tackles big emotions in a matter-of-fact way that steers clear of soap opera antics. Some scenes, including Leo’s breakdown during his visit to a psychiatrist and an awkward post-funeral dinner scene with Leo and his mother (Eva Fritjofson), are played and directed to perfection.

 

A conversation between Josef and his father (played by his real father Jan Fares, a regular in his son’s films) turns out to be a key scene for everything that is to follow but probably looked better on paper than it does on film. From this point on, the characters seem to detach themselves from who they have showed themselves to be in order to fit revenge fantasy clichés.

 

The first hour of Leo, with its hand-held digital camerawork and sophisticated level of character honesty, worked much like a dogma film except for its use of non-source music, but its credibility is strained -- and dogma’s prohibition on the use of effects and fake blood is out of the window -- when the two friends are persuaded in a matter of seconds to help gun down the men responsible for Amanda’s death. Something more is needed than the excuse of simply wanting to lend a friend a hand to retain character integrity and take the audience along for the ride.

 

Still, Fares shows promise as a writer-director of drama, and his matter-of-fact portrayal of the tight friendship between the blond, green-eyed Leo and the dark-skinned Josef and Shahab is completely natural (the fact that they are friends in real life might have helped). Terfelt is terrific, while Fares and Silehi also acquit themselves admirably as actors and Fares also shows he clearly knows what to do in the editing room.

 

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