Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland are among the countries that I only know through cinema, which means that I confuse them a little. The trotting races did not help me to distinguish them, all the racecourses on the planet having no homeland other than that of the Horse, which has no borders, the racegoers being above all citizens of the world of racing. So I did not see much of Sweden on the day of Mister JP’s victory, at Jägersro, the racecourse in Malmö, nor did I recognize Bergman’s films in the fairground atmosphere that reigned that day at the weigh-in, and in the evening, during the sale of yearlings, the bidding owners had nothing to do with the perverted bourgeois of the films of Lars von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg. They are great, the racing people, but they don’t make an impression on the cinema. Elusive, they only resemble themselves.
Johanna Pyykkö, the director of My perfect stranger, Just 40 years old, she was born in Finland, grew up in Sweden and currently lives in Norway. She was the assistant to Joachim Trier, the Norwegian director, born in Denmark, to whom we owe Thelma, a Swedish-Danish-French-Norwegian film.
My perfect stranger is Johanna Pyykkö’s first feature film. It’s a parable of the difficult relationship that Scandinavia has with the rest of the world, I said to myself as I left, or it’s a lesson in altruism for the greedy, xenophobic West, rich and non-violent for comfort rather than ethics. Indeed, the complete stranger in Pyykkö’s film is lying unconscious on the damp pavement of Oslo’s port when he is discovered by Ebba (Camilla Godo Krohn), an 18-year-old girl, who is leaving work in the middle of the night. She approaches him, she thinks he’s dead and she finds him handsome, or conversely, she finds him handsome and she thinks he’s dead, before realizing that he’s breathing. Her first instinct is to call the emergency services, because he has a head injury: “Come right away!”
She gives the address. Then she tries to revive him, talks to him, he opens his eyes, she finds him even more handsome… So she calls the emergency services again: “No, it’s going to be fine, I’ll take care of it.” That suits them, on the other end of the line. She asks the complete stranger his name, if he hurts anywhere, if he can get up, he doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know his name anymore, what he’s doing there, or what happened. She’s in love, that’s it. She takes him to the luxury house she looks after while the owners are away on holiday. She takes care of him. Ebba isn’t ugly, she could even be beautiful if she put her mind to it. She’s not like that. She has a problem with love, it’s complicated for her to meet boys. This one is perfect, docile, a real swimmer. While undressing him, she found a key in his pants pocket that must be the key to his car. Thanks to the beep of the remote lock, she finds the car in the parking lot of the port, and inside the car, if I remember correctly, there are the identity papers of the one who is no longer a stranger to anyone but himself. When he wakes up, when he asks her who she is, Ebba explains that she is his girlfriend, for three months. “And me, he asks, what’s my name?” On the papers she found, his name is Ivaylo, he is Bulgarian, but she hides his papers and calls him Julian.
It’s an interesting love story. But then she wants to drag her Julian into the pool. And they discover that he’s afraid of water, as if he didn’t know how to swim. Is it possible that he’s forgotten? He hasn’t forgotten how to walk, how to talk. How could she not know that her boyfriend couldn’t swim? Doubt is sown in Julian’s mind. For her part, Ebba discovers that her stranger is not as perfect as he seemed. From there, things get complicated.