If this is the age of helicopter parenting and the Young Adult (YA) genre is its cultural manifestation, then 2011’s The Crown Jewels (Kronjuvelerna in the original Swedish) is as good an Exhibit A as you’ll find in any case for the prosecution.
Life is full, absolutely full, of bear traps and kids need to know about them. People can be horrible. Open water can kill. Boyfriends can turn out gay. Mums can die. Dads can lose their legs. Rape can happen any time. Insanity lurks. Make sure you turn the gas off.
The story is told in flashback, from a Swedish police interrogation room where a kindly inspector (Tomas von Brömssen) wants to know why a young woman called Fragancia (Alicia Vikander) shot a local lad called Richard (Bill Skarsgård). I’ll tell you why, she offers without any hesitation, it all goes back a very long time, to the moment we were born, in fact. And so, without so much as a shimmer of the screen, unfolds this tale of woe.
Fragancia and Richard were born to two very different families. Fragancia to a dotty dad and doting mum, poor as mice. Richard to a shoe-factory magnate and blowhard and his meek wife. They were born at the same time, in the same hospital, and were almost accidentally swapped at birth, which leads to the defining moment of this story, when Richard is dropped by one of the dads on the hard hospital floor and winds up with a metal plate in his head. He will always be a bit weird.
From here a charge through the parallel and often overlapping life stories of Fragancia and Richard, lives filled with misfortune – and the odd ray of sunshine. Fragancia’s eccentric father, who believes in alchemy and labours to turn lead into gold, impoverishing his family as a result. Her mother, a tender soul prone to mental and physical illnesses of an unspecified sort. On Richard’s side the over-achieving father who wants him to be an ice-hockey star though Richard has no talent, and a mother who only impacts this story when she is being raped by her husband.
Along the way a brother to Fragancia, born with Down’s syndrome and the “crown jewel” of the piece, a boyfriend for Fragancia, by the name of Pettersson-Jonsson (Björn Gustafsson), an ace ice-hockey player whose blond good looks stir a furious jealousy in Richard. Plus death, destruction, more death, madness, amputation, tearful separation and, finally, a gun being waved about in the night, towards Richard, whom Fragancia blames for the latest woe to befall her family.
It is all done in the sunniest of styles in an indeterminate recent past where smartphones are absent. No dark melodramatic music or shadowy lighting in this fairy tale. Director Ella Lemhagen shoots it all crisply, without tricks, and she downplays the fantasy sequences in Carina Dahl’s original story.
At one level the dysjunction between form and content is bizarre, at another it’s the paradox of the YA genre (style?) distilled – bad shit happening in a sunny way. Mummy will kiss it better.
My issue with this film is clearly more the whole YA thing than the film itself, which bolts along in spite of the massive amount of plot that needs to be reeled out. Three actresses play Fragancia, with Vikander obviously grabbing the most attention. This was the beginning of her surge towards stardom. A year later she’d be in A Royal Affair, two years after that Ex Machina.
Bill Skarsgård makes for an interesting villain, a young man clearly wronged against and destined, as if by fate, to end up being shot, his Richard tacks this way and that as a poor little rich boy deserving (occasionally) of sympathy.
Jesper Lindberger plays Fragancia’s brother, Jesus, to whom bad things happen as if the name determined it. Loa Falkman is Richard’s dad, a parent it’s hard to like – no helicopter parenting style from him and look how that all works out.
Moral: make the best of an imperfect world.
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
