text: With a transgender teen searching for her true self in the Swedish hinterland, Ester Martin Bergsmark’s Something Must Break lends a poetic look at the unbecoming state of becoming.
  Following on from Ester Martin Bergsmark’s poetic and semi-autobiographical documentary on third-gender Swedish emo-kids She Male Snails, Something Must Break is a wholehearted leap into fiction, following Ellie as she transitions from Sebastian and discovers a new identity and hitherto underexplored sexuality. There are elements from Bergsmark’s previous film Pojktanten that resonate – what with his woodland sexual encounters, fashionable youth and an intimate camerawork that caresses its protagonists. But away from the experimentalism, there’s a visual richness to Nånting måste gå sönder with its slow-motion moments of ecstasy and moody close-ups that set it apart. An enigmatic tale of a young man finding herself, Something Must Break is a tender portrait of sexuality and youthful self-discovery.
  Sebastian (Saga Becker) is living as Ellie, sharing a flat with his lesbian friend Lea (Shima Niavarani) and working a dead-end job in a DIY store. He longs for something more than the casual encounters he indulges in in parks and public toilets, but it’s not until Andreas (Iggy Malmborg) enters his life, rescuing Sebastian from a homophobic beating, that a door opens. It’s a brave new world of possibilities – a free space of friendship, sex and freedom in which Sebastian can enjoy something approaching a lasting relationship, and become Ellie at last. But as Andreas starts to worry it might all be getting a little too gay for him, Ellie ups and leaves – unable to content herself with a romance of half-measures and borrowed prejudice.
  Like the rose that opens in the first sequence, Ellie’s identity is an unfurling that occupies the narrative arc of Something Must Break, charting her progression from self-loathing transsexual to proud woman. And while Bergsmark’s film takes pains (almost clumsily) to point out the thorns that kick off Ellie’s story, it’s a lean but sensitive journey from dreamer who never says no to assertive lover refusing the unassured love of a confused man. And it’s a narrative marked by metaphoric shots of demolition and rebuilding, as Ellie destroys Sebastian and her former self, veering dangerously close to suicide, so that she can blossom into her true nature. Like the relics Ellie keeps in a keepsake box beneath her bed, including the tissue Andreas wipes his bleeding nose with, a visual awareness of her inner turmoil is recreated through symbols, like the spider crawling over human skin.
  It’s a visual exuberance that both fails and succeeds – at its best in the choral-scored disco scenes or the slow-motion sequences of rough ecstasy – like the tableau of feminine pink in the middle of a mass of brown male bodies, all set to Peggy Lee’s You’re My Thrill. Brief moments of delight in a humdrum existence of self-doubt. But the imagery is also obvious and clichéd, as the two lovers go skinny-dipping beside a sewage outlet or spin around in a car park – a careless romanticism lacking in either originality or optimism. Like the finale that sees Ellie facing her new dawn on a rubbish heap, Bergsmark’s intentions are worn too obviously on his sleeve, giving into an admittedly more discreet but still centuries-old desire to drag his heroine through the mire.
  But just as the cinematography in Something Must Break veers between the sublime and the scatalogical, so too does Bergsmark’s sparky script; occasionally shocking as Sebastian intones his inner monologue, “You can piss in my mouth if it’ll make you love me.” It’s crass but not always daring, with self-conscious lines such as “You’re so beautiful I want to vomit” aiming for an irreverence that robs them of their power. Nevertheless, a naive but poetic expression of transition – somewhere between male and female, innocence and experience, love and self-hate – Ester Martin Bergsmark’s Something Must Break is both a film of honest intimacy and a blazing testament of youth.
  A Silent Voice is an unusual and sensitive anime about deafness and teen bullying based on the long-running manga by Yoshitoki Oima.
  Shoko, drawn with big-eyed cuteness and voiced by Saori Hayami, is deaf. She has expensive hearing aids but she prefers to communicate with others by writing on a notepad. When she starts at a new school, as the only deaf person in a class of hearing children, it’s hard for her to make friends and she’s cruelly bullied by shock-headed Shoya (voiced by Miyu Irino). Their class teacher is insensitive and unsupportive.
  The music over the opening of the film is The Who’s My Generation and that sets the tone for a sensitive look at contemporary teen mores. Shoko is driven out of the school by Shoya’s bullying, but as a result, at high school he finds that he’s become a friendless teen, shunned by his classmates – drawn with an X covering their faces when they look at him. As realisation of what he’s done dawns on him, he’s filled with guilt and self-loathing. He’s befriended by another outcast, Tomohiro (Kensho Ono), a fat boy desperate to be liked. A no-nonsense character who makes an appearance is Yuzuru (Aoi Yuki), Shoko’s gravel-voiced tomboy little sister.
  When he meets Shoko again at high school, Shoya devotes himself to trying to make amends, even learning sign language so he can communicate with her, but it’s a hard challenge. He arranges for them both to meet up with some of their former classmates and they go to a funfair but the consequences of what happened before are still present. There are intense, painful teen feelings on both sides, attempts at suicide, and even victim-blaming of Shoko for being too accepting of the way Shoya treated her. Then, as time passes and they are reach 18, they try to define their friendship and maybe even love.
  Yoshitoki Oima’s manga Koe no Katachi (The Shape of Voice) ran for 1,300 pages and was serialised in a weekly magazine for boys in Japan. It has been condensed by Reiko Yoshida, losing some of the continuity and subplots of the original, for Kyoto Animation studios, directed by Naoko Yamada. The film is released in the UK not long after My Name, in which the animation seems more virtuoso – both coincidentally have a traditional festival and fireworks scene. A Silent Voice is commendable though for its depiction of deafness, shown to a great extent from Shoko’s point of view and, interestingly, for showing sign language conversations without subtitling them. Its themes are dark but it’s also redeemingly educational.