This 2006 Swedish film is based on a real-life hate crime story that happened nine years earlier. It started with the unlikely relationship between Peter Mårten Klingberg a conservative Swedish engineer who ran his family’s old established business, and Nassim Pjotr Giro a free spirited Algerian immigrant who occasionally worked as a waiter and dreamed on moving to Paris to open his own Tabac. There was however an instant physical attraction between the two men when they first espied each other, and Nassim quickly usurped the place in Peter’s life of his long-standing girlfriend Maria (Karin Bergquist).
Once the two men had moved in together Peter not only lost his job but all his friends deserted him too as the Gothenburg portrayed in this story is oddly extremely homophobic. Left to mix in with Nassim’s more flamboyant and socially active friends, Peter was more than a little out of his comfort zone. However the two men seemed madly in love and totally devoted to each, until that is one day Nassim threw a temper tantrum saying that their life together was too boring. This unexpected turn in the story throws us as much as it confounds Peter as it comes out of the blue and without warning.
We are learning most of this in a whole series of flash backs as at the very start of the movie the local Police had smashed the door of the men’s apartment and arrested Peter for the murder of Naseem whose body had just been discovered in the park. The evidence is purely circumstantial but as a dazed and confused Peter starts relaying events as he remembers them to a particular nasty pair of homophobic detectives who are convinced of his guilt, we are never sure if he in did in fact murder his lover until the movie is almost over.
Klingberg and Giro have great chemistry as the odd couple and despite the clumsy and badly handled break-up, both gave very credible performances that kept made this thriller the compelling view that it is.
Labels: 2016, drama, full frontal nudity, hate-crime, swedish, thriler
