Swedish Punks

“Punk is dead,” they said. Not so. Bobo and Klara in Lukas Moodysson’s latest feature, We Are The Best! ignore that admonition, enlisting Hedvig to play in their newly formed punk band, naysayers be damned. The film, based on graphic novel, Never Goodnight, written by Moodysson’s wife Coco, is also set in Stockholm in the early 1980s, but strays from the original text in other ways. Nonetheless, Moodysson says, it stays close to the tone.“[It’s] not completely true to the story, but true to the tone and the atmosphere, and I think, with a graphic novel, they’re black and white, they can be really detailed, you can’t really be as detailed when you film something with a camera.

I think [Coco] was really touched by seeing her childhood portrayed in colour and on the big screen and everything. I think she relates very much to the tone and atmosphere. But for example she never knew someone called Hedvig who was Christian, so that’s an invention of my own, there are a lot of storylines that I invented.” For Moodysson, it was a chance to interrogate his own relationship to the Swedish punk scene of the 1980s. “[Coco and I] grew up in different places so we didn’t know each other when we were teenagers, but we had a lot of the same experiences, both in things like we listened to the same music and we wanted to look the same and we had, for example, fathers who disappeared… I would probably have been scared of her if I had met her in 1982 as she was just a little bit tougher than I was.”

Moodysson describes his decision to write about women’s experiences as punks as being a little bit of a challenge to the traditional punk set; in reflecting the experiences of women who were often excluded from the scene, he, also unable to fit into the rigid masculinity of the group, could be a part of the movement too. “I think punk where I grew up was very very masculine. I love punk especially, but I also see some very negative things about punk and one of them is that even though the punk subversive movement tried to be very anti-establishment it still kept a lot of those established gender stereotypes, for example, so it wasn’t really as revolutionary as it pretended to be. It was still all about boys standing on the stage screaming and jumping up and down and girls sitting in the crowd looking at boys.

From a feminist perspective it wasn’t very subversive at all, it was a very traditional movement. Even though I couldn’t put that into words when I was 12 years old I still felt without putting it into words that there was something wrong with punk and that it was too macho and too masculine and too tough for me, sort of. There were some older people where I grew up who were punks and they were really tough and they were destroying things and eating glass and things like that and I just felt that I was a weak little boy and I would never be like that.”

We Are The Best! is in cinemas nationally 18 Sep

Win Tickets Here