A potentially tranquil desert island now overrun with vacationing Europeans chugging day-glo cocktails, Gran Canaria is an intrinsically funny setting for a story of familial grief, disconnection and rapprochement, and for much of its running time, “Butterfly” gets the joke. In scene after scene, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen‘s second feature gives us anguished, combative conversations discordantly soundtracked to pulsating EDM, or moments of hard-won serenity against a backdrop of luridly fluorescent kitsch. The jagged tonal chaos is the point in this bracingly offbeat story of distant sisters coming to terms with the death of their likewise estranged mother, at least until “Butterfly” drops the irony and embraces a new-age ethos initially milked for comedy.
Striking and often unpredictably moving — before an ungainly third act that frays into a profusion of endings — Søimer Guttormsen’s film places a lot of trust in its leads, erstwhile “Worst Person in the World” co-stars Renate Reinsve and Helene Bjørneby, to sell its wild swerves in mood and perspective. Both are up to the task, grounding these sometimes floaty proceedings in some human guts and grit. Reinsve is obviously the international selling point for this multilingual Rotterdam premiere — and on the face of it, a Norwegian film casting her as an emotionally fragile artist carrying a whole lot of complicated family baggage might lead audiences to expect a retread of “Sentimental Value.”
Such expectations would be misplaced, however, for “Butterfly” is as antic and wayward as Joachim Trier’s Oscar nominee is quietly composed — its spirit adrift somewhere on the ocean-wide spectrum between Ibsen and “Absolutely Fabulous.” Nor are Reinsve’s characters in the two films remotely alike, save for them both being performers of some description. With bleached eyebrows, a septum piercing and a wardrobe heavy on latex and leopard print, she cuts a punkish figure as Lily, a former model turned musician-cum-filmmaker-cum-professional scenester on the Hamburg art circuit. It’s a life far removed from that of her older half-sister Diana (Bjørneby), a straitlaced, downtrodden kindergarten teacher in small-town Norway, and that’s how she likes to keep it.
Norway might be the sisters’ native land, but it’s not where they grew up. That would be Gran Canaria, introduced in the film’s dizzy opening shot. A teetering aerial glide over its parched rural mountainscape, it follows first an iridescent butterfly and then an elderly woman, her lank grey hair and violet-colored cloak in flight behind her as she runs toward an isolated observatory tower, before entering and shrouding herself in translucent material. It’s a scene giddy enough that we assume it’s a dream — though as it turns out, it’s the pretext to a peculiar news story that draws Lily and Diana back to their childhood home. Their mother, former resort worker and full-time free spirit Vera (Lillian Müller), has been found dead in said observatory, and no one quite knows what happened.
As the sisters tensely put aside their differences to investigate, a complicated backstory emerges — involving, in the recent past, Vera’s May-December affair with naive, shirt-averse hippy Chato (Numan Acar), and their joint plans to build a spiritual mountain sanctuary around the tower where Vera met her curious demise. There’s much amusingly brittle culture-clash comedy in the early going, both in the sisters’ chalk-and-cheese lifestyles — Lily wading into a resort pool in a black PVC swimsuit and outlandish headdress gets a belly-laugh — and in the united front of skepticism they put up against the windchimey esoteric philosophies spouted by Vera’s various loopy cohorts.
But it’s not all easy jokes on easy targets, as the film gradually exposes a genuine well of pain and trauma in the women’s shared family history. That accounts equally for Lily’s arch froideur and Diana’s enduring lack of self-worth, played by both actors with care and compassion, and contrasting flickers of vulnerability and resolve, respectively. Yet just as a gradual, emotionally satisfying thaw is reached between the two, Søimer Guttormsen’s script drives them apart again, cuing a protracted denouement of departures and reunions, hugging and learning, and an earnest sentimentality that feels at odds with the film’s spikier instincts. By the time a character observes that “we could use some kind of closure,” the audience may be inclined to think we’ve already had it.
To the end, however, there are pleasures in “Butterfly’s” casual, uninhibited construction. That extends to the roving, untethered movement of David Raedeker’s camera, capturing both the austere beauty and the overbuilt tackiness of the setting in bleachy, unrelenting sunlight, and to the film’s varied, agitated electro soundtrack from former A-Ha keyboardist Erik Ljunggren. The beat never stops in Søimer Guttormsen’s restless film, even when the party does.
English (US) ·