Calgary Underground Film Festival 2014 - CUFF 2014: We Are The Best! (VI ÄR BÄST!)

Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2014 at 12:00 PM

We Are The Best! (VI ÄR BÄST!)

by Dustin Griffin, CalgaryMovies.com

I got into punk music when I was around 12. MxPx’s Life In General had recently come out and my friend’s mom bought him a copy on cassette in an effort to veer him away from the likes of Nirvana and Bush (then called Bush X in Canada) towards more family friendly fare. It didn’t take. He wasn’t into the speedy hooks or the cheesy sentiments about girls, God and growing pains. He showed me the tape when I was at his house one day and I was hooked from the first machine gun tattering of the snare. I wore that tape literally out. From there it was on to Green Day, Offspring, Rancid, Pennywise, etc. Later I got into the older stuff from the 70’s and 80’s. It’s in the sometime 80’s when We Are the Best! takes place.

Superficially, We Are the Best! is about three girls who start a punk band and practise their one song in the hopes of having it down well enough to participate in an open mic at a neighbouring town. What it really concerns though is a trio of punk loving girls and the puberty-inflected life of someone in their early teens. It’s a coming of age story and as such is universally relatable regardless of who your friends were or what music you listened to. These girls are dealing with the same things most boys and girls of that age do: the pains of love; the annoyance of parents; the struggle and search for identity. The utter hell that seems to plague every move, making your hormone-tilted world view seem as if every decision you make, no matter how big or small, carries with it the ability to end the world. But there’s also the things that make that period of life so amazing: the friends you’re sure you’ll have forever; having your whole life in front of you; the absence of financial stress like not having to pay bills, for food, a mortgage.

Rites of passage can be hard, but they can also be exhilarating. We Are the Best! captures these frustrations, these exhilaration’s perfectly. It strikes a particularly resonate chord with those of us who grew up loving punk, who were in crappy bands with our friends who were as bad at their instruments as we were at ours. With those of us who were ever betrayed by a friend dating someone we had a crush on, or pissed a friend’s mom off, or for those who grew up with a lonely single parent who seemed to have a different date over every night they walked in the door. 

I’m not very well versed in the Denmark film scene and have never heard of We Are the Best!’s writer/director Lukas Moodysson. Or the graphic novel the film was based on (which was written by his wife Coco). I had also never heard of any of the cast. I kind of like that though. Particularly when the actors are as good as these were, giving incredibly naturalistic performances which, coupled with the docudrama style of filming, create a very real, almost rustic atmosphere which doesn’t falter throughout the entire film. I don’t know how much or how little of the film contains autobiographical elements from the Moodysson’s own lives, but they handle the material, in writing and execution, like it’s something as familiar as an old glove.

And it can be said that something that the makers of We Are the Best! understand is the same thing that the makers of like-minded films like SLC Punk, This Is England and Suburbia understood. That the anger, frustration, confusion and independence that has typified punk rock over the years, are the same thoughts and feelings that lend themselves so well to one’s teen years. And regardless of what the soundtrack to your life sounded like when you yourself were coming up, I’ll bet there’s a punk song or two out there somewhere that sounds like it was written specifically with you in mind.

Rating: *****

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We Are The Best! (VI ÄR BÄST!) was reviewed at the 11th Calgary Underground Film Festival 2014. An encore screening will be on Sunday, April 13, 2014 @ 1:30 PM at the Globe Cinema.