The Reunion (2013)

Directed by: Anna Odell
Country: Sweden

Movie Review: “The Reunion” marks the directorial debut by the controversial Swedish artist Anna Odell, known for having been charged by prosecutors in Stockholm 2009, in the sequence of a fake suicide attempt made for a final art project while student. The idea for this film came up when Odell wasn’t invited to her High School class reunion party. With a bold structure and adequate acting, Odell crosses the frontiers between documentary and fiction, breaking the film into two different parts – ‘the speech’ and ‘the meetings’. In the first part she decides to create a film of what the party could have been if she had been invited, featuring a lot of tense moments with the former colleagues of high hierarchies, cheerless recalls from the past, verbal confrontation and even physical violence. The second part, Anna decides to meet with some of them to show them the film and know their opinion. The goal is to unmask and ridicule those who always ignored her due to their status, bullied and tricked her, or were false friends. Some of them showed to be constrained, others showed to be inveterate liars, and some others just demonstrate they never grew up. Odell’s little revenge took an artistic form – the cinema itself, but is visible a restrained fury in her eyes and an enormous pleasure to confront her ‘little friends’ with the truth. “The Reunion” adopts the same Scandinavian weightiness of Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration”, bringing into question how the human integrity can be affected due to certain behaviors.