In his early 20s, Norwegian director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel held a variety of roles at a primary school, including substitute teaching, leading afterschool programs and working with children with disabilities. The experience was “very profound” and led him to meet “great people,” Tøndel said. It also allowed him to observe parents’ behavior.
Tøndel’s time working with kids preceded his feature filmmaking days, but he’s no stranger to the world of cinema: he’s the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. His debut feature trains its eye on the kind of school environment where he spent his early professional life.
“Armand,” which made the Oscars international feature film shortlist for Norway, opened in U.S. theaters on Friday and closely scrutinizes parental reactions to an extreme incident between kids. Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) plays Elisabeth, a single mother whose 6-year-old son Armand is accused of an alarming altercation with another student.
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Elisabeth, a well-known actor, and the other student’s parents begin a volatile dialogue moderated by school staff in a classroom. The adults’ escalating discussions satirically reflect politician speech, Tøndel said, in the way that they talk circuitously with “nothing of content.” The strangeness heightens as one of the staff members tries to staunch an incessant nosebleed mid-conversation and when Elisabeth launches into an almost 10-minute fit of laughter. In two dance sequences, the film takes on a more surreal shape.
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Tøndel was nominated for the DGA’s first-time theatrical feature film director award and won the Caméra d’Orat last year’s Cannes Film Festival. He flew to Paris soon after the DGA Awards last Saturday and spoke to Variety via Zoom about the visual composition of “Armand,” conveying Elisabeth’s emotional confusion and attending the DGAs.
Why was the education environment something that you wanted to satirize?
We had the leadership and the government being portrayed as the school system, and we had the people, which are the parents. And we had the Greek choir, the other parents discussing the case, which is the public. Within the school system, it was a lot of good parallels to our society in a microcosmic way.
What interested you about that duality of Renate’s character who is a mother and a parent at the school like everyone else but also very famous?
I think it was a very interesting element to make her an actor because people do have a lot of preconceptions about how actors maybe are not authentic the whole time, that they are faking, and in an incident where you as a mother have to be believed, that suspicion of you not being real and not being authentic is, of course, a very damaging part. At the same time, maybe she is manipulating, maybe she is faking. For example, in the laughter scene, is she faking that?
With the tense conversation scenes where they’re sitting very closely, how did you approach blocking that and what was it like in that room when you were filming?
There are four scenes in the classroom in total, and we wanted the staging of it to evolve. So in the beginning, they are sitting more far away from each other, and then, of course, they are sitting tighter. And in the end, when Elisabeth is alone with the three from the school, she is surrounded in a way that it’s a wall of resistance against her. We made a conscious choice of shooting those scenes a little bit different. For example, the nose bleeding scene, it’s a very Spielbergian way of shooting a scene with how the camera turns from around the table and ending up in a profile shot of the nosebleeder. We wanted to try to make those kind of compositions and be quite conscious about the staging in that sense, and not shooting it like a very regular shot-reverse shot conversation that we see a lot. We wanted to be very conscious about the dialogue scenes and the claustrophobicness of only using close-ups. We are almost not using master shots at all.
Can you break down what is happening in the laughing sequence?
It’s the absurdity of the situation. She’s being called into this meeting, and she’s being thrown very off guard with accusations about her and her son that she has never heard before. She’s being accused in front of the other parents, and there’s just a lot going on, and there’s a lot of grief in there, and it’s a lot of fright. And sometimes, at least for me, when there’s just a mix of emotions and you don’t know how to react, you can start laughing. I have been robbed one time with a knife, and I started laughing after. When my grandmother died, I started laughing in the funeral because I didn’t know how to handle the emotions I felt, so it came out as laughter, and it’s just a really primal response to something you don’t know how to cope with.
Why was it important for you to include the dancing scenes, which break the linear plot?
The first dancing scene, I thought about it as Elisabeth’s resurrection almost. Dance is just such a beautiful art form, and I love dancing in films. I thought it made sense also because she’s an actor, she’s a performer, so she could use the expression of dance to build herself up again. I also like the fact that we don’t really know what perspective we’re seeing the scene from, and at this point in the movie, everybody’s starting to lose their sense of reality. In the beginning of the scene, we are following the principal, and we’re seeing the dance from his perspective. But then we are suddenly in another perspective, which is more like Elisabeth’s perspective. So I like the fact that we really don’t know who is the crazy one here, and maybe both of them are crazy.
I’d love to know about the school where you shot the film.
I looked at maybe 250 schools before I saw this one, and I was very relieved when I found this one. In this school, we could even build things, we could paint…and it was just amazing school with a lot of soul in it. And you kind of feel that also in the film. It had all these qualities that I was looking for: the big hallways, the stone floors, the Gothic architecture, the grandioseness of it all, the institutionalized feeling and the mysterious feelings in the hallways and how the rooms relate to each other. How the school was going to feel and look like was something I was very, very clear and had a very strong vision about from the very beginning of the development phase, already in 2017 when I started writing.
The scene in the room with blue projection light, was that a visual you had in mind before you found the school?
That was something that was in the script from very early. When I was working in a school myself, I came in a lot of times to a classroom where somebody had forgotten to turn off the projector. Because the film turns more and more fantastical in a way and elevates from the social-realistic drama, I felt we could take some liberties in the visual style of the film as well and be quite cinematic about it.
What was it like being at the DGA Awards with other filmmakers?
Oh, it was amazing. I was so proud of being there, I was so proud of being nominated. As a director from Norway, it’s quite amazing to be nominated for first-time feature director in the U.S .and by my own peers. It was a real, real privilege sitting there in the room with so many other great artists and filmmakers. It was actually really one of the biggest honors of this crazy travel was being nominated for the DGA, and I think RaMell Ross had a very deserved win with “Nickel Boys,” which is a film I really love for its boldness and the writing and the acting in it. So I didn’t care one bit that we didn’t win, it was just fantastic to be there, to be nominated.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
