Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

We Are the Best! Blu-ray Movie Review

Best of Friends

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 2, 2015

We Are the Best! is the first film by Swedish writer/director Lukas Moodysson since his ambitious 2009 English-language debut, Mammoth, which had a mixed reception at home and was little seen in the United States. Moodysson has said that, after making Mammoth, he was "tired both of film and myself as a director and sought out other avenues". Having begun his creative life as a poet, he turned to novel writing, completing two books. He taught film classes, played chess and (as it now seems) waited for something to reawaken his cinematic interest.

That something arrived in the form of a graphic novel by Moodysson's wife, Coco, entitled Never Goodnight, which was loosely based on her experiences as a rebellious teenager in the 1980s. Moodysson, whose work has been notable for its young female protagonists (memorably in his tender debut, Show Me Love, and his searing indictment of the sex trade, Lilya 4-ever), freely adapted his wife's story into a lively and energetic tale that was immediately hailed as a return to the upbeat tone that had first galvanized audiences in his early features. Entitled We Are the Best!, the film is propelled by the boundless energy of three remarkable young performers whose chemistry and exuberance confirm the oft-repeated adage that good casting is a director's most important job. We Are the Best! is set in the early Eighties, which means that a lot of work went into recreating the period and erasing all traces of a later era dominated by cell phones, the internet and musical instruments powered by digital technology, but Moodysson does the work invisibly, so that his camera seems to be randomly catching these young characters experiencing life as it happens. In Moodysson's tale, kids don't "come of age". They just live from moment to moment.

The year is 1982. In Stockholm, two thirteen-year-old girls, Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin), are best friends united both by a common sense of alienation from their families and schoolmates and by a devotion to punk music, even though punk is supposed to be dead. They wear boyish clothes, style their tween hair as oddly as possible (Klara's is a faux mohawk created with soap), and treat everyone else as an enemy. Despite their friendship, though, the girls are opposite personalities. Bobo is reserved, stubborn and passive-aggressive, while Klara is loud, boisterous and in-your-face confrontational. Together, they are a formidable pair.

The differences between Bobo and Klara reflect their upbringings. Bobo is the product of divorce, a latchkey kid whose mother (Anna Rydgren) loves her but is preoccupied with her own romantic pursuits. Klara comes from a solid family with an indulgent and somewhat bohemian father (David Dencik, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), who tolerates his daughter's rebellious nature. Naturally, each girl prefers the other one's family.

Bobo and Klara form their band by accident, when they end up stealing the practice session booked at the local youth center by an all-male band called Iron Fist, in revenge for being heckled by the band members about their looks. Neither of them can play an instrument, but Bobo bangs away on the drums, and Klara saws at the bass guitar (an allocation that will later become a bone of contention, when Klara insists that they stay with those instruments). The experience inspires them to write lyrics protesting their gym class, and the thought of performing such a provocation at one of the quarterly talent shows in front of the whole school, including the gym teacher, seizes their imagination.

At the next talent show, Bobo and Klara focus on Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), a tall blonde who plays classical guitar and routinely gets booed. Well-known as a devout Christian who has no friends and eats alone in the school cafeteria, Hedvig is not someone to whom the two would-be punks have ever paid any heed, but suddenly a light turns on: This is an outsider just like us—and she knows music! Shortly after, the solitary Hedvig is shocked to find herself cornered in the school lunchroom by two new best friends. Before she knows what has hit her, the band has become a trio.

Many adventures follow, as Hedvig gradually teaches Bobo and Klara such basics as singing in the same key in which they are playing. Meanwhile, Hedvig's disapproving mother (Ann-Sofie Rase) tries to come to terms with her daughter's new interest, while the girls have their first encounter with serious drinking, try to raise money for an electric guitar, experience romantic rivalry with a band of boy punks and, eventually, have their first public performance. Nothing in We Are the Best! is any bigger or more momentous than any of the events I've already described, but the triumph of Moodysson and his young cast is to draw you inside their experience so that the story feels momentous, just as such things do to someone of that age. Their enthusiasm is contagious; their fights feel real; their disappointments are saddening (and, fortunately, short-lived).

The film's true narrative isn't so much about individual events as about the relationship among the three friends that grows and deepens because of these events. Their first public performance doesn't amount to much, and the youth center officials overseeing the process are far from pleased, but Bobo, Klara and Hedvig laugh, hug and cheer about the whole experience. As far as they're concerned, they had a wonderful time. As Moodysson has explained:

I wanted to make a film showing that life - despite all evidence to the contrary - is worth living. . . . It's wonderful to have a friend, wonderful to play an instrument without knowing how, wonderful to set fire to an old statue, wonderful to have the most annoying parents in the world, wonderful to throw up on someone's records, wonderful to be booed and mocked, wonderful to be the best.

We Are the Best! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Information about the shooting format of We Are the Best! was not available, but the credits indicate that the film was digitally edited and "graded", and its listing in the SFI Database indicates that it was released via DCP, all of which suggests that Magnolia Home Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was derived directly from digital files (as is the case with almost every contemporary feature film). The cinematographer was Moodysson's frequent collaborator, Ulf Brantås, who, according to Moodysson, shares his love of improvisation.

If it weren't for the carefully chosen period wardrobe and production design, We Are the Best! might almost be mistaken for a documentary, because the camerawork is largely handheld (though not "shakycam"), and the frame is never subject to the kind of stylized color wash that is typical of so many feature films today. Rarely, though, does documentary filmmaking achieve the kind of consistent focus and precise coordination of objects and wardrobe that one finds in We Are the Best! The acting and camera moves may have been improvised, but Moodysson has confirmed in interviews that the costumes and sets were carefully planned. ("I'm always interested in clothes and objects", he has said. "I believe that exterior reality reflects inner reality, that objects have souls.") The Blu-ray image provides the sharpness and detail necessary to appreciate the care with which Moodysson has created the world of Bobo, Klara and Hedvig, but the image also has a natural texture and lack of harshness that suits the pre-digital period. The color palette, which favors reds and blues, is rich but not oversaturated, so that the film's world is visually stimulating but not artificial or obviously stylized.

With no extras, the 103-minute films fits on a BD-25 with an average bitrate of just under 23 Mbps. While the average isn't impressive, especially by Magnolia's usual standards, the bandwidth has been sufficiently allocated between quiet scenes and those with tumultuous activity to avoid any compression issues.

We Are the Best! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

We Are the Best!'s original Swedish 5.1 soundtrack is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, with optional English subtitles. Separate English SDH subtitles are also available. Although the film is nominally about a band, it has a notably barren soundtrack. There isn't even an independent score. The only music is "source music" from stereos, walkmans or various performances. Consistent with the film's documentary aesthetic, the sound mix is primarily front-oriented to focus on the dialogue between and among the characters, with stereo separation used to convey off-screen presence of elements like the party that Klara's brother gives (from which the girls steal drinks) or the birthday party for Bobo's mother (from which Bobo flees to call Klara and commiserate). I can't opine on the clarity of the Swedish dialogue, but even if the three young actresses don't always enunciate perfectly, their faces and mannerisms are so expressive that it hardly matters

We Are the Best! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Although Magnolia's original press release for We Are the Best! listed featurettes about the making of the film and the music, as well as a photo gallery and trailer, the disc has no extras other than the following, which are standard on Magnolia Blu-rays:

• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The disc includes trailers for A Long Way Down, Tasting Menu, Frank and Frontera, as well as promos for the Chideo web service and AXS TV. These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live gave the message "Check back for updates".

We Are the Best! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Moodysson has said that he wanted to return to the tone that he struck in Show Me Love and his popular second feature, Together. He has certainly achieved that goal with We Are the Best!, but in a completely new and original way. In an interview, his three young stars described how he would let them improvise freely, listening quietly and intently for take after take, moving on only after he had heard what he wanted. The results have a freshness and authenticity that transcends even the language barrier, because the nuances of communication between these characters are non-verbal. According to Moodysson, his next film will be a romantic comedy. If anyone can figure out how to revive that genre, he's the one to do it. Even without features, highly recommended.