The Sami people are the aboriginal people of the Nordic region and a minority in today's Sweden. Like me, most people who watch the movie have never seen or even heard of such a nation before. But this story obviously touched a lot of people. What got us interested in the experience of a Sami girl? Which corners of our hearts does this story touch?
Audiences from different backgrounds seem to have found some confusing issues in this story, about national identity, cultural identity, or, in other words, body identity. How to face mainstream culture? How do you understand your own culture? How does a person gradually bow his head in the face of a strong culture? The film provides a model of physical discipline through the story of a Sami minority girl, and nakedly shows the means of physical discipline in a power culture. As for the female protagonist from a different race, step by step, she succumbed to such a culture, making the story filled with sadness.
As the female lead of the Sami, she lived in the Sami way in her childhood. She cut off the ears of the reindeer and said 'it's yours'. This is the ritual of taming animals, declaring one's own possession through the violation of the body. At that time, the heroine probably never thought of her future fate. Singing beautiful yoik (the Sami's own form of song), the girl sends her sister to school and comforts her troubled sister with songs of her own ethnicity. The years are quiet.
However, once at the school founded by the Swedes (mainstream culture), girls have to look back at their alien bodies under various reminders. At school, students are required to speak Swedish, recite Swedish poetry, and learn all about Sweden's 'excellent culture' as dictated by the authorities. Among them, the female protagonist with excellent grades began to yearn for the kind of life she had learned, and the Swedish female teacher who was closest to her was the symbol of this superior life. She sneaked into the Swedish female teacher's room and drank a cup of hot tea gracefully with her pinky fingers raised, following the teacher's pose. At that moment, she fantasized about being that teacher. She sneaks into the party herself, be sure to sneak in the teacher's dress, and even claims to be the teacher's name, Chissy, whom she tried to be during such an adventure as a child. At a party, she met a handsome little guy, and probably from then on, she found out that being a Swede can be so wonderful.
However, reality shattered her vision, pulling her back to reality all the time, facing up to the reality that she has a body that is different from others. When the inspection team came to visit, she desperately washed her hair and her body, hoping to get rid of the reindeer smell on her body. But when she gradually removed the body symbol of her own nation, the inspection team still marked the ruthless with the symbol of the alien barbarian. They measure the skulls of Sami students with calipers, despising their stupidity. Schoolgirls were even forced to undress and examine their bodies like animals. As an outstanding student in the school, the heroine was called out to do the first demonstration. At this time, she could see the struggle in her eyes, and at the same time she was full of desire. When she finally accepted the truth and took the lead in showing her body without dignity, she wondered if she had made up her mind to say goodbye to such a shameful identity.
Another important moment of surrender occurred in a conflict with a local group of Swedish delinquent teenagers. A group of boys mocked her for having a Sami body and finally found a chance to watch the bullying. The boys brutally cut off a piece of her ear. She stood up, bloody, with something more complicated than humiliation on her face. At this moment, she wondered if the moment when she cut off the ears of the reindeer in her clan appeared in her mind, if she also said to herself, "I am yours", just like the trial of the reindeer. For the possession and taming of the disadvantaged group (reindeer), the Sami choose to harm the body and forcibly mark the possession symbol, but when the more "superior" ethnic group harms and occupies the body, she finally admits the ending of being tamed. The superior nation bowed its head and bowed its head.
Since then, he has tried his best to bow his head to the mainstream ethnic group, even if he is regarded as an alien, even if he is not respected. There is a magical power in the girl's mind that tells her that she wants to live that kind of life that looks superior, and that she wants to be that superior body.
It was her own choice to flee to a Swedish city alone, and it was a hard and decisive journey. And the examination of his own body never stops. The Swedish university looks so beautiful, the girls are fair-skinned and tall, and she is short and stocky, standing in the middle of a group of white swan-like girls. She has never taken a gymnastics class. She is probably infinitely ashamed of her body. The determination of his own body is also unprecedentedly strong. The female college students laughed and asked her to sing Yoik, and they could feel the entanglement in her heart. That is, after all, a body symbol as an alien. When she finally mustered up the courage to sing a small tune, the handsome guy she liked reminded her that maybe she didn't need to sing that long. I think that at that time the heroine made up her mind to say goodbye to everything in the past. Everything related to one's own nation is just exotic in the eyes of others, used to tease and entertain, but has no respect.
However, I don't know if this has inspired her, and she would rather have a reindeer and sell her father's inheritance than enter a Swedish school to transform herself? The heroine's later life is unknown. What kind of life did she experience? Did she really transform her body as she wished? Have you really lived the elegant life of that excellent nation? Everything is unknown. All we see is the old man at the beginning and end with his eyes full of stories. When she was getting old and returned to her hometown, although she still kept the habit of pulling her hair to cover her ear wound, the sense of identity in her heart was different from when she was young.
There was almost no dialogue, but the resentment and determination in her eyes revealed too many stories. When she finally returned to the group, she was far away from the elegant gatherings of the Swedes, but went to the mountains that belonged to the Sami, and struggled to climb to the top. When her hair was disheveled and her body trembled, she, who had been constrained by the physical discipline of the alien, seemed to have suddenly received divine enlightenment, and at that moment she found her body belonging to the Sami. She was short, and she looked up all her life. You need to look up to the female teachers at the school, to the handsome boys at the party, to the female students at the university, to all the bodies about the superior Swedish nation. And in the end, when she returned to her hometown, she finally bent down and struggled to climb. After looking up for a lifetime, it seems that we have finally found a dignified life posture. We who listened to the story outside the venue finally felt the return and liberation.
Foucault discusses the 'smart' means of discipline 'body' in modern society in his wonderful Discipline and Punishment. And the physical discipline that can be seen everywhere in the film is full of metaphors. How to transform their souls? Just start by training your body. How to discipline the body? Just start with 'self-discipline'. The heroine stared at her alien body all her life under the guidance of mainstream culture, feeling inferior, ashamed, and disgusted. A series of disciplines about the body eventually transformed into the heroine's self-discipline. The stigma about the body when she was young, the physical and spiritual violations of the body, all laid the foundation for her whole life to surrender to this more "noble civilization" nation. Abandoning all the imprints she once had and trying to shape herself into a new other, this is the luck that the mainstream culture wants to see, but it has caused the biggest misfortune in her life.
mountain
June 11, 2017
2017 Sydney Film Festival
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