Paradise Is Burning is one of those films that appears to be designed to convince the outside world that Sweden isn’t all IKEA interiors and ABBA sing-alongs. There are blissful long summer days spent in pine forests and plenty of lithe-limbed girls, but the focus here is on a social underclass that Ingmar Bergman rarely filmed.
Set in a suburban town near Gothenberg, the movie is the story of three sisters with an absentee mother. Laura (Bianca Delbravo), the oldest at 16, knows that the local authorities will take 12-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and six-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg) into care, if they find out that she’s been left in charge. Over a frantic few days before a social worker appears, Laura tries to find a suitable adult to stand in for their mother, while also keeping her sisters fed and clothed, mostly through shoplifting.
First time feature film director Mika Gustafson has made documentaries before and deploys the observational skills she learned in that field. Her young performers are non-professionals and wholly convincing as siblings who clearly love each other but can also be infuriating. It’s hard to say whether Gustafson found three great young actors or whether they’ve been cast so close to their natural personalities that they’re barely acting at all – either way, they are a pleasure to watch.
Gustafson is aided by the excellent Danish cinematographer Sine Vadstrup Brooker, who uses naturalistic lighting in cluttered interiors and favours close-ups of faces. At times, Paradise Is Burning is reminiscent of Charlotte Regan's Scrapper and Sarah Gavron’s Rocks, which painted similar summer-time portraits of young girls on housing estates trying to manage without their mother.
Set in a working-class neighbourhood and featuring second-generation immigrants in the cast, Paradise Is Burning also has something of the flavour of Lukas Moodysson and the Dardennes brothers. It’s clearly a film made for the festival and art house circuit, and it did well in its native Sweden, earning good reviews and several top awards.
When Gustafson stays in the milieu of the sisters and their peers, she creates an engrossing world. But when Laura makes friends with Hanna, an older woman who is intrigued by the teenager’s habit of breaking into wealthy homes to enjoy their owners’ enviable lifestyle, the film starts to fall apart.
We never really understand the motivation of Hanna (played by the acclaimed Swedish actor Ida Engvoll , familiar from A Man Called Ove and The Bridge). Is she in the grip of some kind of post-natal depression, marital unhappiness or latent desire? Why does Laura’s aunt, who appears in one scene working in a travelling circus, reject her niece’s pleas for help? (Pictured above: Bianca Delbravo, left, and Ida Engvol)
The ellipses in the narrative lead to a sense that the director didn't fully flesh out the adult characters, so so absorbed was she in capturing the performances of her young cast. Too many false endings make Paradise Is Burning feel longer than its 108 minute running time, and somehow slightly less than the sum of its parts. Still, it’ll be intriguing to see what happens to the young actors, particularly the very striking Delbravo.
