28/21
Synopsis
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing boundaries against his best friend in elementary school.. Norway’s official entry for the ‘Best International Feature Film’ category at the 97th Academy Awards 2025. I get why it won the Camera d’Or at Cannes 2024, but for the love of my life I couldn’t follow the film past the middle. A single celebrity mother is invited to her son’s school by an incompetent teacher-administrator duo to discuss an incident involving her son and his friend. It’s a great premise and Armand had my rapt attention, also thanks to the fantastic opening shot and overall camerawork up until that point. But then it veers into self-indulgence territory and I still have no idea what the director was up to, with a mix of abrupt dance sequences and an actor laughing for 3 minutes at a time. That’s where it all started and after that the whole affair becomes frustrating never to recover (Watched at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024)