05/06/2013 - Mikael Marcimain's first feature vies for an important award at Romania's biggest film festival

One of the ten (out of 12 films) first features in the competition of the Transylvania International Film Festival (May 31 - June 9), Mikael Marcimain’s gripping Call Girl [+see also:
trailer
film profile] has become one of the festival’s favorites. Voted the second most popular title in the competition (after Indian director Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus) and the most popular European title, Call Girl mesmerized the festival’s audience with its excellent blend of personal drama, police investigation and national scandal.

Marcimain’s needs only a few minutes to draw the political context: in the late 70s, Sweden captivates other countries with its government’s revolutionary laws on women’s rights. But the same politicians who make Sweden an example in the world of sexual liberation prove to be the protagonists of a seductive, glittery and dirty world of sex exploitation. Through the attentive and discreet endeavors of Dagmar Glans (a very convincing Pernilla August), the country’s most beautiful young women furtively get into the same room (and bed) wof the country’s most powerful men…

The story interlaces several points of view and the result is a multi-layered and colorful tableau of the sex world where men of power, young girls and policemen clash trying (but not succeeding) to save bits of innocence. As Marcimain says in his director’s statement, Call Girl is “a story of lost innocence: the young girls’, the police’s, the politicians’”. The most obvious case is the protagonist’s: Iris (Sofia Karemyr), a troubled 14-year old who is attracted, almost out of inertia, from the aimless world of a juvenile home into the glittery universe of Dagmar Glans.

She will soon find out that the woman’s motherly behavior conceals high plans for Iris, whose milky skin, blue eyes and tall frame charms some of the country’s most important men. Iris’ drama is interconnected with a police investigation - when the Swedish Secret Service realizes that minds holding some of the country’s most important secrets meet with girls for all over the world, a quiet investigation starts in order to bring down Glans’ business. But what happens when those supposed to sanction the investigation are also among those with most to lose if their names get involved in the scandal?

Mikael Marcimain was second unit director for Tomas Alfredson’s critically acclaimed European co-production Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and that’s obvious in Call Girl’s perfect art direction, which revives so convincingly the colourful ABBA years. Intense and engrossing, the story makes the audience forget about the film’s rather longish duration, stressing that nobody is safe in a world where so many interests clash.

Call Girl is one of the best examples to stress the change of direction in TIFF’s competition selection. If previous editions focused on discovering very small films and promoting Romanian first or second features, the 12^th edition of TIFF throws some of the most famous and awarded new films in the race for winning the Transylvania Trophy, the festival’s top award. Among Marcimain’s competitors there are Tobias Lindhom’s A Hijacking [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tobias Lindholm
film profile], Michael Noer’s Northwest [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michael Noer
film profile], Michiel ten Horn’s The Deflowering of Eva van End [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michiel Ten Horn
film profile], Pola Beck’s Breaking Horizons [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Iveta Grofova’s Made in Ash [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iveta Grófóva
interview: Jiří Konečný
film profile], to mention only the European titles in this year’s multi-continental competition.

The awards will be announced on June 8.