Becoming Astrid

Astrid Ericsson is a young woman growing up on a farm in Sweden. At sixteen she starts work at the local newspaper and enters a relationship with its married owner. She becomes pregnant. It cannot be hidden in the town; she goes to Stockholm and then to Copenhagen and has to leave her child with a foster family. She keeps working and saves to bring her son home. Years pass. Pernille Fischer Christensen directs. Alba August plays Astrid. The film is about the youth of Astrid Lindgren, who later wrote Pippi Longstocking and became one of the most read children's authors in the world; the narrative never treats those books and stays entirely before them. The idea is this: the strong, ungoverned, solitary child in Lindgren's books did not come out of nothing. The film does not state that connection, it shows it and leaves it. The social consequences of having a child outside marriage in the thirties are given in detail; the system punishes the woman and asks nothing of the man. Alba August's performance was praised; she comes from a Swedish film family herself. Its limit is the pace; the narrative is long and the second half repeats scenes of waiting. Who it is for: viewers who like Scandinavian drama and biographies of writers. Who it is not for: it is heavy, the emotional register stays high, and the film is somewhere else than a viewer expecting Lindgren's work would want.