“Border” (2018) is a cinematic adaptation of a John Ajvide Lindquist short story called “Grans.” Lindquist is best known for writing “Let the Right One In.” This Swedish magical realism/crime drama film follows Tina, a distinct looking, perceptive Swedish Customs Service officer. Tina (Eva Melander) has a perfect track record of detecting smugglers so when Vore (Eero Milonoff), who looks like her, rouses her suspicions, she is confused. She gets recruited for her natural talent to help in a disturbing special victims crime investigation and dismisses her initial impression of Vore as attraction. These decisions unexpectedly spark an emotional journey of late self-discovery, which leads her to a crossroads regarding her identity.
I wanted to see “Border” when it was in theaters, but it only played at one theater with limited showing times so I had to wait until it became available for home viewing. It exceeded my expectations and accomplished the difficult task of surprising me with its big reveal about Tina and Vore’s origins. I incorrectly guessed that they were an almost extinct species of prehistoric human beings, i.e. archaic humans. I do not know much about the mythology surrounding their origins, but it was a hybrid of two folklore figures. I immediately started noticing parallels with the narrative beats in this story and superhero/comic films and police procedurals even though it has a more deliberate pacing and belongs in the independent foreign film category.
“Border” is no blockbuster or popcorn movie. Without the fantastic elements, the protagonist could have easily been an average looking older person who unwittingly conformed to society and felt uncomfortable, beaten down and different only to discover that there is a valid reason for that feeling and was robbed of a freer, happier existence. Such themes are usually explored in the “X-Men” franchise films. Explicit difference can be a metaphor for race, gender, sexual orientation. This film goes through the similar stages of these films: establishing how different a person is from those around them; discovering that they are not alone and enjoying that fellowship then having to make a choice between siding with ordinary people versus supremacy over them.
Because “Border” is an independent film, the last act was shocking because it lacked the nuance usually explored in independent and foreign films. By melding the crime drama to this film in the last act, it does equate Vore and Tina’s origin with something monstrous. Tina must reject happiness or risk becoming an ethical monster. She is forced into being unhappy and return to ill-fitting conformity armed with the bittersweet knowledge that she deserves more. When I was younger and watching the “X-Men” franchise, it never occurred to me that this type of narrative was limiting and binary because it mirrored our assumptions about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr as if they were universally applicable. After “Black Panther” (2018) and the popularization of Afrofuturism, i.e. instead of imagining a dystopian future, filmmakers imagine an optimistic future and images of liberation, I notice that even in narratives that seek to empower minorities such as Tina and Vore, there is an underlying conformity to majority culture, an innate nervousness that the now empowered minority dreams of revenge against the majority. The majority demands reassurance by creating a narrative that divides minorities instead of an utopian unity among minorities. It is easier to imagine minorites as monsters and threats that need to be eliminated because it fulfills the guilty fevered imagination of the majority. The fantasy is that other minorities will agree and protect them thus keeping the majority’s hands clean. These stories are not as empowering as I once believed, but are soothing parables for the majority regarding where minorities belong in society without any discomfort to the majority. I want a narrative that ignores the majority.
“Border” had moments of pure bucolic paradise between Vore and Tina, which rendered the human storyline irrelevant and an afterthought. Imagine if these narratives created a world outside the harsh reality of conformity, a world which is discussed and teased, but underexplored, left in the margins. Melander and Milonoff are fearless actors in the way that they convey their characters’ joy and surprise in finally finding their match and being able to live fully as themselves. In a less skilled filmmaker and less versatile actors’ hands, Vore and Tina’s scenes could have become fodder for ridicule and turned into a Saturday Night Live skit, but their interactions are dead serious. I loved that the film found a way to imagine how another species would socialize without making it into a spectacle. Normally a sex scene feels prurient like an excuse to show off famous, attractive bodies, but this one felt essential to the plot. Tina is depicted as a woman used to living a solitary life even though she has a boyfriend and resigned to a sexless life. With Vore, she has a revelation and reacts with a mixture of shock and exultation, and Vore greets it with enthusiasm. Any other type of reaction from an intended lover would have reinforced Tina’s belief that she is defective, but it is a moment of freedom that no one, including herself, has ever understood basic facts about the nature of her existence. Tina is finally able to experience her basic rights as a living being, and with her property location and ownership, it was possible to live as an ideal life as possible in this world.
By injecting the crime drama in this story, “Border” is clinging to a familiar storyline of the enemy seducing a woman law enforcement officer. Stories about women officers get obsessed with her vulnerabilities, particularly with respect to romance and sleeping with the enemy from “Blue Steel” (1990) to Deb Morgan from “Dexter” (2006-2013). It is disappointing in this context because this film plays with gender and sexual orientation in a way that set the stage for this film to defy socialized expectations. Instead Tina has to deny her sexuality as a source of weakness to remain aligned as a moral character. To make her safe and affable to viewers, like most women presenting protagonists, Tina is a self-appointed protector of children. As a nurturer and protector, Tina is acceptable. As a sexually empowered living being, she runs a risk of turning evil. To be fair, this film has a dim view of sexuality and majority of human characters have toxic sexual relationships that lack consent or are criminal/immoral at worst and illicit at best.
“Border” falls short, but is still a riveting film. For people who did not like it or complained that the protagonist was unrelatable, this movie provides a Rorschach test of bias towards beauty. I loved that the film was so empathetic to someone who would be perceived as a dumpy middle-aged woman. I need someone to explain to me why Sweden is so focused on sex crimes in its dramas. Is it prevalent there? Even in a place considered a liberal paradise, gender norms are still so toxic and warped that it leads to the most aberrant types of violence. I highly recommend watching this film if you do not mind subtitles, but warn viewers that the pacing could be challenging.
