‘Armand’: Cinema’s Ultimate Nepo Baby Arrives With His First Film

Thanks to superb turns in The Worst Person in the World, Handling the Undead, A Different Man, and TV’s Presumed Innocent, Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve is on a path to superstardom, and that trajectory continues with Armand.

Winner of the Camera d’Or (for best first film) at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, this bracing import, which hits theaters Feb. 7, is a sturdy vehicle for its lead, who radiates a beguiling mix of fury, shame, hurt, and desperation as a mother mired in a crisis created by her young adolescent son. With a demeanor that shifts, at sudden and jarring instances, from steely to wounded, Reinsve reconfirms that she’s one of international cinema’s most electric presences, and her formidable performance is the axis around which this taut drama revolves.

After failing to reach her six-year-old son Armand on the phone, Elisabeth (Reinsve) walks down the hallway of the boy’s elementary school, her steps as urgent and intimidating as her hair—parted to the side and pulled back tightly in a ponytail—is severe.

Elisabeth has been called in to attend a meeting about Armand with Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), the parents of his classmate Jon, as well as his teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), who’s instructed by principal Jarle (Øystein Røger) to stick to procedure and to “be careful about the words you choose. Be diplomatic. Sober.”

Despite claiming that she’s up to the challenge, Sunna almost immediately seems in over her head, flip-flopping between discussing the situation as serious and unserious. It’s not long before she’s unnerved by Elisabeth, who arrives asking why she’s been summoned, and gets defensive when Sarah and Anders show up and the details of the dilemma at hand begin coming to light.

As the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel has quite the familial legacy to live up to, and he sets Armand’s scene with suspenseful eeriness, courtesy of gliding, graceful pans down empty corridors that rotate and zoom to view classroom doors and wall decorations, such as a kid’s drawing of missiles raining down on people which suggests impending destruction.

The proverbial bomb drops shortly thereafter, with Sunna explaining to Elisabeth that Jon was found in a bathroom crying, a scratch on his cheek and his pants pulled down, and that he subsequently confessed that Armand—angry about being spurned in the schoolyard—pinned him to the ground, groped him, and hit him. According to Jon, Armand threatened that if Jon didn’t stay silent, he would be violated “anally.”

Elisabeth bristles at this report, not simply because she’s sure that Armand didn’t commit the assault—she asserts that a six-year-old wouldn’t even know, much less use the term, “anally”—but because she feels she’s been blindsided, asked to discuss a matter without first having the opportunity to hear her child’s version of events.

Armand fixates so heavily on Elisabeth’s alternately stony, shocked, and outraged countenance that it elicits immediate empathetic engagement with her plight, and Reinsve conveys her flurry of emotions with magnetic poise and intensity. At virtually every turn, the film rests on her expressive face, and the director and actor draw us deeply into Elisabeth’s inner turmoil as she strives to process this madness, build up barriers to fortify herself against attacks, and manage a predicament that threatens to escalate beyond her control.

Like Laura Wandel’s Playground and İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, Armand plumbs the tense interpersonal dynamics of a primary school, where parents and teachers are committed to doing right by kids and yet are also often positioned as enemies, desperate to protect themselves against accusations and condemnations.

As Elisabeth, Sarah and Anders’ meeting continues, Tøndel fleshes out his scenario, divulging that Elisabeth is an actress whose career has fallen on hard times, whose husband recently perished under debatable circumstances, and whose relationship with Sarah and Anders is strained and complicated. The filmmaker doles out key information in offhand conversations, albeit somewhat gracelessly, so that it’s not until some way into the proceedings that Sarah and Anders are identified as Elisabeth’s sister- and brother-in-law.

Similarly, it’s eventually revealed that Jarle was close to Elisabeth’s late husband Thomas, who—depending on the speaker—was either driven to kill himself by the difficult Elisabeth, or an abusive lout who beat his wife.

Reinsve’s performance is precise and assured and it peaks with an extended classroom confrontation during which Elisabeth laughs uncontrollably—over everything and nothing, to increasingly hysterical degrees—for minutes on end. If the character transfixingly comes apart at the seams, however, the film slowly unravels as well, and not in a way that Tøndel likely intended.

There’s a fuzziness to much of Armand’s second-half plotting that muddles rather than clarifies its characters’ tangled bonds and the true nature of Armand’s alleged misdeed, with Sarah and Anders remaining indistinct figures and Sunna, Jarle, and their colleague Ajsa (Vera Veljovic) never amounting to much. Ajsa’s recurring nosebleeds appear to represent something, but what that might be is anyone’s guess. The same goes for two separate sequences featuring Elisabeth in a hallway—one in which she boogies, herky-jerky-style, with a janitor, and another featuring her being lovingly, and violently, manhandled by parents—that push things into overly symbolic territory.

In that latter dance-like tug-of-war, Reinsve does her best to silently communicate Elisabeth’s anguish, yet she can’t make up for the sheer pretentiousness of the moment, and Tøndel stumbles in trying to find a suitable way to lucidly resolve his tale. What commences as a thorny clash of wills between parents and administrators ultimately becomes too diffuse for its own good, even spending random time on a collection of adults who—in a different classroom—debate the specifics of Jon and Armand’s encounter and whether or not they’d trust their own offspring with the latter. An adulterous affair and more graphic surprises about Armand’s conduct attempt to heighten the stakes, only to come across as additional hazy factors.

Still, Reinsve is so captivating that Armand never fully succumbs to its own self-inflicted wounds. It may not be the project that finally launches her career into the stratosphere, but it’s proof that she’s capable of making even off-key material sing.