Turn Me On, Dammit (2011)
A light-hearted comedy with Norwegian Sweetheart Helene Bergsholm as Alma, a young girl experiencing puberty & tormented by her hormones & erotic desires.
Fifteen, bored and furiously horny, Alma discovers that in a tiny Norwegian village, one awkward brush with a boy’s erection can become everybody’s bloody business.
Alma lives with her weary single mother in Skoddeheimen, a backwater where the buses are slow, the gossip is fast and sexual adventure mostly happens inside her overactive head. She masturbates, calls expensive sex lines and spins elaborate fantasies about Artur, the handsome, blank-faced schoolboy she desperately wants. Then, during a party, Artur presses his erection against her thigh. Alma excitedly tells her friends; Artur denies it, and by morning she has acquired the humiliating nickname “Dick-Alma.” What ought to be a private, thrillingly strange encounter becomes a public trial, with Alma treated as a dirty liar while the boy strolls away untouched. Her friends retreat, her mother discovers the colossal telephone bill, and a supermarket job offers little escape from the village aquarium, where everyone watches...
everyone else. Even Sara, her disenchanted friend who writes to a death-row prisoner in Texas, seems to have a more interesting life. Alma’s lust gradually curdles into anger: she confronts Artur, battles her embarrassed mother and dreams of fleeing to Oslo, where Sara’s glamorous older sister Maria appears to represent freedom, adulthood and a world in which desire need not be village entertainment. When Alma finally heads for the capital and lands among an eccentric young collective, the film opens beyond adolescent embarrassment into something more tender: the need to be believed, seen and permitted to want things without shame. Director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen tells it with deadpan dialogue, odd musical punctuation, voice-over, frozen tableaux and cheeky jumps between reality and fantasy. Some performances are deliberately stiff, but that awkwardness suits a story in which nobody knows what to say. Beneath the knob jokes is a sharp little film about the brutal double standard separating a horny teenage girl from a horny teenage boy.
This is early-2010s rural Norway, though Alma’s sex-line calls and suffocating village life give it a pleasantly analogue, pre-everything-online flavour. Skoddeheimen is fictional, but filming took place around Hjelmeland, Sauda and Suldal in Rogaland, with additional work in Oslo. The western landscape is lovely without being sold like a tourist advert: steep green hills, still water, damp roads, scattered houses and pale northern light make the place feel both beautiful and impossible to escape. The contrast is the joke and the ache of the film—Alma’s head is a boiling erotic carnival, while outside there is fog, silence and perhaps one bus later in the afternoon. The vibe falls somewhere between *Fucking Åmål* and a dry Scandinavian sex comedy: playful, embarrassing, slightly melancholy and refreshingly matter-of-fact about female desire.
Helene Bergsholm gives Alma hungry eyes, stubborn energy and a wonderfully unpolished vulnerability. Her allure is not manufactured pin-up glamour; it comes from the fearless way she lets Alma be lustful, ridiculous, hurt and defiant, often within the same scene. The camera treats her as a complicated adolescent rather than an adult fantasy, which is exactly right. The film includes masturbation, sexual fantasies, blunt talk, opened bras and trouser flies, but it is frank rather than pornographic. Its real nakedness is emotional: Alma has desires she cannot switch off, and Bergsholm makes her embarrassment, excitement and fury painfully believable.
In the sleepy, boring small town Skoddeheimen, Norway, Young Alma is coming of age and is uncontrollably consumed by her hormones and fantasies that range from sweetly romantic images of Artur, the boyfriend she yearns for, to erotic daydreams about practically everybody she lays eyes on.
This 11 minute Juiced cut curates her Cutely Hot scenes from the Norwegian film.
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