Heart Attack: Lukas Moodysson on A Hole in My Heart

By Jason Anderson

A long-haired teenager with flesh-coloured band-aids covering his eyes hardly counts as the most visceral image in Lukas Moodysson’s sensory assault A Hole in My Heart. After all, the movie’s arsenal of ugliness includes everything from sexual violence to genital surgical footage to recreational vomiting. Yet the image is one of the most affecting, partially because the reason for the boy’s gesture is not so much to deny the existence of the horrors around him but to protect himself from them. It’s as if he hopes to spare his mind—and his heart—from any further violations.

Viewers of Moodysson’s film may share the kid’s wish for safeguarding. A Grand Guignol for the age of surveillance video on primetime and downloadable double penetration scenes, A Hole in My Heart feels like an assault. The film takes place in an ordinary apartment in a Swedish suburb as three people spend the weekend making an amateur porn flick. Rickard (Thorsten Flinck) is the bullying yet essentially sentimental director, Geko (Goran Marjanovic), the brutish, dim-witted leading man, and Tess (Sanna Brading) is the naïve young woman with the willing orifices. They are all filled with phony brashness and the ludicrous hope that their movie could somehow be a ticket out of their insipid corner of hell. As they get drunk and high, they goad each other to new lows in scenes that recall the ugliest porn films imaginable as well as the nominally more family-oriented reality-TV fare like Big Brother.

Elsewhere in the apartment, Rickard’s son Eric (Bjorn Almroth) does his best to avoid them by immersing himself in industrial noise and big questions about the nature of UFOs and creatures that live deep in the ocean. “How do they tolerate light?” he asks, as if suspecting his father and his friends are equally vulnerable to its effects. Raw, gruesome, and disturbing, Moodysson’s portrait of human degradation ranks as one of the most abrasive movies in recent memory—imagine Pasolini’s Salò (1976) with quick cuts and Dogme production values. Even the film’s own narrative fails to withstand the abuse. Instead it constantly breaks apart, the storyline interrupted and undermined by grimy, distorted images and eerily idyllic interludes.

All this would be unwatchable if not for the flickers of compassion that surface between the characters. These serve as faint but persistent indications that this is still the work of the director of Together (2000) and Show Me Love (1998, a.k.a. Fucking Åmål), the two films that established Moodysson as a precocious master of a fervently humanistic brand of narrative cinema. With Lilya 4-ever (2002), the bleak tale of a teenage Russian prostitute, a heretofore-undetected anger came to the fore in Moodysson’s sensibility, as well as a greater willingness to subvert linear structure and the careful naturalism of his first features. The political bent evident in Geir Hansteen Jorgensen’s The New Country (2000), the successful Swedish TV series Moodysson co-wrote, also became more overt in Terrorists (2003), a documentary about the treatment of anti-G8 protesters arrested in Gothenburg in 2001. (Moodysson co-directed the film with Stefan Jarl – at present, it is only available in Sweden due to rights issues.)

A Hole in My Heart grew out of research Moodysson did for a film set in the American porn business. As he tells Kristian Lundberg in a book of interviews to be published in 2009, “Initially it was meant to be a big American film. Not perhaps so big if you compare it with an average Hollywood film, but if you compare it with my earlier films, it felt like it was going to be gigantic, with American actors and everything.” Obviously, that’s not what happened: A Hole in My Heart was shot in the same Trollhattan apartment where Moodysson lived while making Lilya 4-ever. Though the environment inevitably gives the work a narrow, cloistered feel, it lends the sense of a private ritual—even as the apartment becomes a locus of worldly horrors, there are suggestions that the participants will gain the power to transcend them. Moodysson jokingly refers to A Hole in My Heart as a “documentation of a raindance or something,” and he’s not far off the mark. Through a series of direct-to-camera addresses and fantasy sequences, he gives the characters a forum to air their hidden emotions and hopes. Paradoxically, the tactic restores to the characters the one thing that their culture values the least: their privacy. That Moodysson’s characters begin as empty vessels for cheap and violent fantasies, and end up with souls, is part of what makes A Hole in My Heart more than another arthouse exercise in shaky-cam nihilism. The film’s abrasive squalor conceals an impassioned sociocultural critique and a courageous attempt to understand the process that transforms human degradation into popular entertainment.

Cinema Scope: How did this film you planned to make about the American porn industry end up being A Hole in My Heart?
Moodysson: The American version of A Hole in My Heart was actually the film I was planning to make before I was, like, hit by a truck—and that truck was Lilya 4-ever. When I tried to return to that American version, some kind of story that takes place in the American porn industry, I discovered I couldn’t do it. I had to transform it into this much smaller and more claustrophobic Swedish story. So maybe that says something about Sweden that it turned from a very open, very atmospheric story into one that’s crowded into one small apartment.

Scope: How might it have been different if it had stayed in America?
Moodysson: One difference is there’s no chance that Rickard in this film would go out and have any neighbours who are working with pornography. But in certain parts of Los Angeles, he might. Sweden’s quite big on pornography but not in Sweden. There are a few very big companies, but they are not making films in Sweden. They make them in Eastern Europe. So there are quite few so-called porn stars in Sweden and quite few porn movies—maybe more amateur things, but not much.

Scope: It’s ironic you did so much research on the US industry because the characters in A Hole in My Heart seem so isolated from any kind of business.
Moodysson: It’s like a wannabe industry. But it does have some connections. There are some details that are taken from interviews with people in America and some dialogue is taken from real dialogue with people we met.

Scope: One idea that the film conveys very powerfully is that the popularization of amateur porn and reality-TV has propagated the notion that everyone’s life should be completely accessible to everyone else.
Moodysson: Accessible and then, (he snaps his fingers), just like that, not worth anything. You’re interesting for just a few seconds. There’s a show in Sweden called Idol, which is not unique to Sweden. It’s a talent show about creating new pop stars, but it’s not about people’s dreams of wanting to be famous and sing. Instead, they get slaughtered by the jury. They say, “You are the worst singer ever.” And that is entertainment. It’s not even like the story is about the successful ones. It’s not like Andy Warhol said about the 15 minutes of fame. It’s like 10 seconds of degradation on national television. There was this ship in Sweden that sank called Estonia, so the judges would say things like, “I can imagine you singing on Estonia in the minute before it went down.” That’s like saying you should die. And it’s completely terrible and I think that is one reason why I made the film. I don’t want my children to live in a world like that. It really takes away everything that is holy about human beings.

Scope: Are you suggesting in the film that these are mainstream and pornographic variants on the same phenomenon?
Moodysson: Absolutely. That’s one of the things I wanted to do, connect Big Brother with pornography. I think that sometimes pornography can actually be better for the individual than being on a more accepted TV show. Because after the TV show you’re thrown out into nothing, but that’s not the case with some people in porn. For instance, I did an interview with someone who said she had never ever met a nice person before she entered the porn industry. You can imagine what kind of life she had. So I think to some extent, the porn industry has taken the blame for many things that are happening in the film, TV, and music. I’m not sure that Britney Spears’ life is much healthier than the average porn star’s life. But no one says the music industry should be stopped.

Scope: Yet by making their porn film, your characters believe they will receive some recognition or validation in their culture.
Moodysson: It’s like with Tess—she thinks that some producer in LA is going to see her picture and take her over there. I met a Swedish girl who went into the American porn industry, and then went back to Sweden. She’s now very overweight and she’s got problems with drugs and alcohol, and a problem with her stomach which made her doctor say that she can never ever in her life have anal sex. She told me it is her dream—and for her it’s not like a dream, it’s what will happen—to get back to LA and start over again. It’s so sad because it won’t happen. They flew her in, she was there two years, and then they thought, “Oh, she’s getting a bit fat, send her back.”

Scope: It’s as if they’re strip mining human beings.
Moodysson: That’s also the connection between this film and Lilya 4-ever. Lilya 4-ever is very much about people from Western Europe going to Eastern Europe and just taking everything they can and refilling it with their shit, like cigarettes. People are very naïve about this in Sweden. Sweden is a country with a theoretically very strong labour union tradition and very strong workers’ movements. But there are completely naïve ideas that we have to accept the fact that big corporations move their production to Estonia. They are blind to the fact that they are not doing it to support the rise of democracy in Estonia, but because they don’t have to pay so much for the people. They don’t have to respect workers’ rights or anything. They can say anybody who wants to join a labour union, “It’s okay, but we’ll fire you.” We’re really blind to that fact. We pay these people so little money, they will have to prostitute themselves—they cannot survive on the salaries we give them. It really is like strip mining.

Scope: Would you describe the events in A Hole in My Heart as symptoms of larger political and social crises?
Moodysson: And cultural crises I would say—cultural and commercial degradation.

Scope: The structure of A Hole in My Heart is very non-linear and fragmentary, but did you start with a more conventionally social-realist approach?
Moodysson: The approach was more the opposite. The linear elements of the finished film emerged through chaos. It was more like I intended the film to be even more chaotic. Like when all hell breaks loose in the second part of the film and at the end, when it’s just images thrown everywhere—it’s like broken glass. That’s more what I intended the film to be. And as I worked, some kind of linear thing came out through that. I was actually disappointed by it for a while. I felt like I let down my idea. But after a while, I accepted it.

Scope: Was the style inspired by any other particular films?
Moodysson: One film that made a very interesting impact on me is one I don’t remember the name of. This is one way I could imagine my film to work. I saw it 10 or 15 years ago, a Russian movie about Stalin times in the 50s or maybe 40s. It is a very monotonous series of mostly naked people being brought to execution. It went on and on. It was made not in an experimental way—it was just person after person being shot. There were piles of bodies. I really hated the film. First of all, I thought it was extremely boring. Actually, I think I fell asleep. I thought it was overdoing it—just terrible. It’s taken ten years, and I don’t remember the director’s name, or even the name of the film, but it’s one of the films I’ve thought about most in my life. [Moodysson later remembered the title when he listed his favourite films for the Guardian: it’s Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s 1992 film The Chekist.] Now it’s become an image that’s stayed with me. I would be happy if my film had the same effect: if people hated it or feel asleep but then ten years later, it popped back out and they thought it said something about the world.

Scope: Another tendency your film illustrates is how this supposedly transgressive imagery is becoming normalized. Really, what we see here is not so provocative anymore.
Moodysson: I tried to invent something that I had not seen, so I wrote the scene where Geko throws up in Tess’ mouth. The day after I had written it, I was reading a site on the Internet which is like the Variety of the porn industry. A person there was writing about going to Rio in Brazil and having sex with a girl in a helicopter circling over the city and then throwing up in her mouth. I thought, “I invented this yesterday and now you’re doing it for real!” I tried to invent that one but it didn’t work.

Scope: Were you very nervous about asking so much of the cast?
Moodysson: First of all, I was very careful in choosing the actors and the actress. I wanted to make them understand that it’s not about me choosing them, but us choosing each other to do this project. I really had to read and discuss this with them and not allow them to just say, “Yes, I want to do this.” I would tell them, “That’s great you want to do this, but go home and read the script and think about this.” I think with Sanna, who plays Tess, I started by showing her the worst scenes, maybe just to shock her. I don’t push actors to do things and I don’t think I even try to talk them into doing something. What can be great about making a film like this—which is really the opposite to real pornography or reality shows—is that this is a place where you can act out strange things that you do not want to happen to you for real. I am not an actor, so I don’t think I have a need to know what it feels like to do what they do. But I think for them it can be very interesting. Maybe it’s a good way of having therapy—to be able to act out something. Actually, I think a lot of pornography is based on the same sort of thing.

Scope: That performative aspect is one of the most interesting aspects of porn as well—that certain images can be visually interesting, yet not something you would ever integrate into your own life.
Moodysson: The problem now is that pornography is getting much more available and much more influential on mainstream culture. It’s less of an underground culture. Like when it enters into fashion photography, then it becomes part of something else. It’s not like pornography in the 80s, where all the girls had strange big hair and you always had the feeling that this is a fantasy—this is just acting. But pornography today, you almost feel like it’s real. It’s like the interview with Tess in the film when she’s talking about herself and they’re asking her, “How old are you? Do you want to get fucked?” That’s something that wouldn’t have happened in the 80s. I think that’s very, very dangerous, especially to young people who see it and think that this is the norm, that this is what they should do. Like, “I’m 14 years old, but I have to have anal sex or otherwise it’s not really sex.” That can be devastating.

Scope: It sounds as if you made the film so you could change the world for the sake of your children.
Moodysson: It’s even more than that. I have this naïve idea that if I put things into a film then they will stay there in the film. I will take them away from the real world and put them into a film. It doesn’t really work out, but it’s one thing I try to do: to include them so I can exclude them from the world.

Hole In My Heart

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