Butterflies in the Stomach: Coming Out and the First Time

Åmål is truly the last place you’d expect anything hip to land. When the Swedish backwater finally succumbs to something glamorous — like a rave, for example — the glossy magazines have already put it at the top of the “Out” list. Fucking Åmål! Yet even the smallest towns have their star, someone who shines a little brighter, who wants more from life than the usual offerings (a job, a house, a family, maybe a divorce). In Åmål, that person is Elin. The blonde “Trophy-Girl,” wearing eyeshadow and striding around in platform sneakers with a defiant steps, is almost overwhelmed by boredom. What could previously be shown in cinema as a moment of irritated, impatient sitting around in the pre-digital era now plays out in this small town setting.

Elin is the center of all glances and desires. Almost every other guy has wanted to be with her at least once. Yet her status as a provincial celebrity doesn’t truly bring her happiness. Others bask a little in her glow. Just by being in the class photo, Elin upgrades the school yearbook into a fan magazine. Agnes looks at it longingly, with awakening sexual desire, while the shy Johan cuts out his secret crush from the page and slips the photo into his wallet, already imagining himself as Elin’s future boyfriend.

“I want Elin to fall in love with me”

“I want Elin to notice me. I want Elin to fall in love with me,” Agnes writes on her “secret wish list.” Although Agnes has been living in Åmål for almost two years, she feels as if she has just moved in. At school she’s an outsider, and so far she hasn’t found a single friend. The only girl who speaks to her sits in a wheelchair and is herself isolated. For the two years younger Elin, Agnes seems almost invisible.

The 16th birthday is a particularly painful day for Agnes. At the party she’s convinced her parents to let her hold, first only her pitying friend Jessica shows up. Then Elin arrives with her older sister — and suddenly kisses her on the lips. What started as a dare becomes the start of a story about first love, lesbian desire, and the self-confidence it sometimes takes to admit being different in a majority world.

Extremely Successful at the Box Office

As a lesbian coming-of-age film, “Fucking Åmål” stood out in a wave of Boy-Meets-Girl stories. The Swedish youth film achieved extraordinary success in cinemas, especially in Scandinavia, and even competed in the same breath with James Cameron’s blockbuster “Titanic.” More than 25 years later, the director and screenwriter Lukas Moodysson—who has since adapted his work for the stage (most recently as a youth opera)—still elicits a charming, lively energy from this classic, even though social norms, including gender politics, have evolved in many ways since the late 1990s. Looking back, the film reveals what it meant when heteronormativity and provincial narrow-mindedness collided at the end of that decade. For Agnes’s way of loving there are no ready-made templates or comparisons in Åmål; “lesbian” is almost a foreign word in the wasteland, and the practice of “bullying” had not yet become a public topic, or had not yet been named as such, at least not widely.

Moodysson, however, avoids portraying societal mechanisms like discrimination and exclusion in a serious, heavy-handed light. Even when Agnes, in a moment of desperation, reaches for a razor, one doesn’t have to worry too much. “Fucking Åmål” remains a film with a light, buoyant tone even in its dramatic moments, and the activists’ stridency of feminist cinema is not its style. At one point Elin and Agnes decide to hitchhike to Stockholm in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the car’s engine won’t start. As the two girls on the back seat begin to kiss passionately to the strains of “I Don’t Know What Love Is” by Foreigner, the driver physically ejects them from the car. The hostility and homophobia of the reaction vanish in the moment of falling in love — for now, they stay stuck in fucking Åmål.

Between Joy and Disillusionment
In a fundamental way, the film is about the difficulties of growing up. How does a person become part of a social community, and how does one act on their own feelings and desires? Sexual orientation is one facet among many. Agnes, who wrestles with the outsider tag, states it plainly: she loves girls and even imagines herself as a writer. Elin is under far more pressure to conform. She’s determined to become a model or Miss Sweden — she loudly declares she wants to be famous in some form — while secretly dreaming of studying psychology. The moment she confesses her love to Agnes, with whom she starts a halting friendship, proves especially hard. Instead of following her heart, she first pursues a relationship with Johan. He can hardly believe his luck. With him she experiences her first sexual encounter, even if it lasts at most five seconds, or as her sister puts it, nothing more than a “boring puff.” Moodysson also invites sympathy for the shy high-school boy with the moped who is nowhere near ready for the storm and drama of his girlfriend. Johan is a nice kid, even if he is merely a stop along Elin’s journey to self-discovery.

Despite the painful developments for Agnes, the film never wavers in its belief that the two girls — who seem so different at first glance — will find their way to one another. Moodysson’s focus is on the path to that meeting, with its obstacles, contradictions, and mood swings. Moments of closeness and falling in love alternate with compromises and self-denial, and after moments of happiness come sobering disillusionment. In the end there is a literal coming out. And: Cocoa with 5,000 pounds of cocoa powder that won’t fit into any glass. Åmål will soon feel too small for Agnes and Elin.

The article series “Queer Cinema Classics” is supported by the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation. It appears in parallel at sissy and TheColu.mn.