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Love in the Style of Trolls
A vote in favor of raw sex
Last night, I saw “Border,” a 2018 Swedish movie by up and coming Swedish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi. The movie portrays the love that arises between an exceedingly homely woman who thinks she’s a human with a chromosomal abnormality and the man (who is actually a troll) who understands she is in reality a troll like him. The film is complex, strange, ugly — and beautiful. The acting, especially by Tina (Eva Melander) is superb. But, it’s the scenes of lovemaking between these two characters that fascinated me.
It was the first time I’ve seen open-mouthed, raw, animalistic sex depicted between two figures cinematically, and it was a revelation. The person I was watching the movie with laughed, but I was transfixed. I found the unabashed open-mouthed kissing, baring of teeth, growling, and grunts a breath of fresh air. Sex was not presented as demure or pretty, but as something urgent, powerful, undeniable, and arresting. Something that subsumes you and allows you to leave your “human” self behind.
Isn’t that what sex should be? An invitation by the divine to exult in our physicality? Permission to be the animals that, of course, we are? We think humans are different from the animal world, but we all have eyes that blink, hearts that beat, blood that runs. We all have sex, nurture babies, grow old…
