We Are the Best! is disarmingly sweet, and utterly subdued for a film about a trio of Swedish youngsters forming a (pretty hapless) punk band in the early 1980s. The girls rail about sports and conformity within the confines of one of the model welfare-states of post-War Northern Europe. They vie for a spot in a local practice space with a somewhat older metal band and negotiate unrequited crushes and parents who seem utterly childish themselves, but none of this is dealt with in a brutal fashion. Instead it does pinpoint with deadly accuracy the queasy interpersonal relations of adolescence, such as who is controlling whom, which haircuts are worthy of being “punk enough,” and when not to vomit on an older sibling’s record collection. Now showing at the Penthouse Cinema in Wellington.
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