I found Speed Walking enchanting.The plot is standard coming-of-age stuff. A boy is in love with his best friend who ends up getting together with the girl that was sort of dating the boy. It's healthy disillusionment--everyone survives the process of growing up.
It's not my favorite plot. Even when I was a teen, I found healthy disillusionment tiresome, even in real life (let alone art). I wearied very quickly of the rumor-mill of who-is-dating-whom-and-who-discovered-the-truth-about-whom-and-who-is-going-to-the-prom-with-whom. Being a teen is basically the story of Much Ado About Nothing--rumors and "notes" and bad advice and assumptions and heart-break and second guessing. Great play and Branagh movie! And a little bit goes a long way.
What I found enchanting about Speed Walking was the sheer freedom it presented. The movie is a 2014 Danish film set in 1976. The teens are largely unsupervised--and although the end implies that the main character is happy to settle back into a childhood with protective parents (he recently lost his mother), the ability of the young teens to go where they want when they want even at night is never called into question.
It's easy to be nostalgic about the past, and I often assume that that's what I am doing: airbrushing the 70's and early 80's with a patina of "good times were had by all."
The last thing I expected was to come face to face with my childhood in a Danish film. And yet!
It seems teens were free-er back then, not just in terms of sheer physical freedom but in their private teen freedom to throw around comments and questions and ideas about death and sex and friendships and drinking without those questions being instantly slotted into RIGHT, WRONG, GOOD, BAD, PROPER THINKING, ACCEPTABLE THINKING by so-called correct-thinking people (on any political or religious side).
In the end, all the teens survive. They get over themselves, as much as they can. They aren't permanently harmed in some deeply mysterious and insidious way by so much non-structured activity, including behaviors and conversations. They grow up. They enjoy life, as much as they can. It's the kind of freedom that groups that want to help teens claim they want to give teens (so teens can "find themselves"), then balk at when faced with the reality. Because it's the type of freedom that doesn't involve outside rules and doesn't invite adults to play.
It is intensely refreshing.
