Not often we get to see female sexual awakening told honestly in movies. Especially from a female gaze that the audience is not very used to. Norwegian director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s feature film debut, Få meg på, for faen! (Turn me on, Dammit!) , which she also wrote, is an adaptation of a novel by Norwegian writer Olaug Nilssen. The coming of age film focuses on a fifteen-year-old girl named Alma, who gets accused of being a liar when she tells her friends about her sexual encounter with Arthur exaggeratedly and then turns into an outcast.
As any other teenage sex comedies, the film has emberassingly awkward events and the purity of youth in its vulnerability. Tired of boredom, living with her single mother in an isolated small town, Alma comes to an age where her hormones are raged and therefore she loses her control to stay concentrated on anything else. Not only it gets to cover overall teen indie movie cliches with a dry humour, but also it pushes the edge of the envelope carefully in its brilliance. With unexpectedly explicit scenes, Jacobsen intends to disprove the thought that women are impossible-to-understand living beings, and their behaviors are inexplicable. Alma is no different than any other people, she just doesn’t care much about her peers’ prude attitudes. She gives information that they expect from her, only a little bit more intimate. Some would hope that there should be more humourous and relief moments to help the audience live in a teenage’s mind like in this painfully dull town, though.
Helene Bergsholm‘s shamelessly playing a teenager when she was 17 at the time of shooting and Henriette Steenstrup‘s ‘worried of being a single mum raising a teenage daughter but also trying to control her own life too’ middle age womanhood helped create mother-daughter relationship far from exaggeration and keep it at a realistic point. With lush dominated color in cinematography by Marianne Bakke and carefully editing by Žaklina Stojcevska, and dreamy soundtrack thoughtfully composed by Ginge Anvik, the film is playing along the female sexual taboo by pushing the boundaries between fiction and fantasy.
