Do you love teen-dramas? Gossip Girl and Newport Beach are your guilty pleasures? Did you love Skins? We have discovered a series made for you! This time, it does not come from across the Channel or on the other side of the Atlantic, but from Norway.
On the other hand, you may be tired of seeing clichés about adolescence accumulate and do not recognize yourself, or little, in series – that we do not lie to ourselves – ultra-idealizing, especially when they come to us from the United States. Apart from a handful of small authentic masterpieces (see Freaks & Geeks, My so-called life or the English television jewel mentioned above), I must admit that few series have been able to account for the state of mind of an average teenager today.
Far from the improbable adventures of American teen-shows – which leave more the feeling of having missed his life than they really echo our situations – Skam limits himself to telling the daily life of a group of friends in the Oslo of the 2010s. Situations that could not be more banal around the first times, the incommunicability with absent parents (whose faces we see, indeed, rarely see), the acceptance of one's homosexuality or attempts to integrate into the high school microcosm. It is this very down-to-earth and ultra-naturalistic aspect that has undoubtedly had its small effect in Northern Europe – 1.5 million spectators on average, when you know that Norway has about 5 million inhabitants, that's a lot! – , where the series reached sudden and abrupt popularity, until its reputation reached Britain and France, where more and more curious people made constant requests for translation. Skam is so popular that an American-Canadian remake is expected to see the light of day soon (after the bitter failure of the U.S. of Skins, there is something to be wary of…).
Anchored in its time, the series is totally anchored: the characters, who constantly use social networks – to spy on a crush (who has never done it?) – or SMS, actually have Instagram or Facebook accounts fed in real time and that fans can consult alongside the series. Sly! It's a way to keep in touch across fictional boundaries. From a purely formal point of view, Skam has something of Ozu's cinema, a general conceptualization close to Italian neorealism: the characters are accompanied by camera-shoulder by long travellings, the actions are minimal and the sequences little cut. It's simple, it happens that they are simply looking out the window without anything interrupting these contemplative moments of rare purity, at a time when everything is going far too fast for us to be aware of the passage of time (a concept that is fundamental to understanding the realism of the image-movement)! Finally, we are pleased to see that silences reacquire a function in their own right in dialogues that also have something awkward and spontaneous, true in short.
Admittedly, some situations lend themselves to laughter – bordering on the parody of American teen-dramas, precisely – such as when the handsome kid from high school is presented to us in slow motion under a background of gangsta rap, to better emphasize the satire, but there are chances that you will find yourself in the pain of an adolescence that is groping as much as in these small moments of daily joy, seized on the fly.
Authentic and of great accuracy.Then, the Norwegian language sounds so good!
