Armand is director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s troubling, entertaining and at times confounding feature debut. Set in a school that has more than a hint of madhouse or military academy to it, the film opens with a scene that could be right out of a heist movie or thriller. Driving too fast down an isolated road is Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), a glamorous actor who has been called into the headmaster’s office to discuss a mystery incident involving her six-year-old son Armand.
Waiting inside are the school staff: the well-intentioned rooky teacher Sunna (a lovely performance from Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), the more experienced yet equally hapless school nurse Asja (Vera Veljovic) whose fraught nerves manifest themselves in copious nosebleeds, and Jarle (Øysten Røger) the cowardly head, who decides that Sunna should lead what turns out to be one of the most harrowing PT meetings ever witnessed. If the building looks like a madhouse, then it appears to be run by the inmates. Adding to the sense of chaos is the broken fire alarm ringing at random moments throughout the proceedings.
Also lying in wait for the oblivious Elisabeth are the steely-eyed Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and her malleable husband Anders (Endre Hellestve). They are the parents of Jon, who has apparently made a serious claim of sexual and physical violence perpetrated by Armand. Sunna is soon out of her depth and Jarle and Ajsa begrudgingly decide to join in the talks. Elisabeth rightly feels blindsided by the accusations and at one point starts laughing uncontrollably before succumbing to angry tears. Reinsve, so wonderful in The Worst Person in the World, is remarkable in this scene and throughout the film. She is having quite a year with her exceptional performance here and in A Different Man (also screening at Tromsø). She is ably supported by Armand’s ensemble cast.
As the discussions continue, so the plot thickens. Tøndel (the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman, no less) also wrote the screenplay and he has devised a convoluted tale, with overlapping stories and secrets. It transpires that Sarah and her brother Thomas (Elisabeth’s dead husband) were once Jarle’s pupils at the school, this fact clouding the head teacher’s judgment when dissecting the story. Sarah and Elisabeth were once close friends, but the relationship has cooled. There are plenty of secrets, many of which are not kept. Sunna tells her colleague Faizal about Armand, and he tells his version to the other parents in Armand and Jon’s class, as if in a fateful game of Chinese whispers.
The film looks and sounds wonderful. When Elisabeth walks down the school corridors, her steps are loud, her raincoat squeaks and her sparkly sandals jangle. The fire alarm jars and then becomes background noise only to suddenly interject again. The school’s exterior is captured as an imposing and hostile place. Inside, corridors seem endless, staircases spiral and paint peels from the walls. In one scene Sarah and Anders sit in an empty classroom, the deep neon blue like a giant TV screen pervading the room.
The film’s premise a reported act of violence and there is plenty of violence lurking beneath the surface of this middle-class tale, such as Sarah’s slapping of her husband and the class parents’ imagined assault of Elisabeth in a surreal, choreographed scene (one of two in the film) reminiscent of Gasper Noé’s Climax. And just as you might expect from a film set in a school, the playground plays a significant part: a space designated for children to play in is also home to cliques, budding alliances and bullying and is where the film fittingly comes to its own satisfying climax.