Show Me Love

The original Swedish title is Fucking Åmål, and it comes from a line: Elin shouts in desperation about why they have to live in bloody Åmål. Åmål is a real town, and the film's entire subject is that nothing happens there. American distribution could not carry that title. Variety refused to run an advertisement for Fucking Åmål, the distributor Strand Releasing asked for a new name, and Lukas Moodysson took it from the Robyn song that plays at the end. It was the most-seen Swedish film of the 1998-99 season at home, with 867,576 admissions and $6.5m in Sweden. Ingmar Bergman called it a young master's first masterpiece. Two girls at the same school. Elin is popular and bored; Agnes is the girl nobody in the class speaks to, and she is in love with Elin. What starts as a bet takes them both somewhere neither expected. Who it is for: viewers who like adolescence shown as both funny and merciless, by someone who knows small-town boredom. Who it is not for: anyone expecting technical polish. It was made cheaply and handheld and never hides it.