Loneliness, self-harm and prostitution. An adolescence of suffering and flat-out tragedy is depicted in Danish director Søren Green’s debut feature film, B.O.Y. Bruises of Yesterday, which was screened in competition in the 25th Lecce European Film Festival following its selection in the Helsinki International Film Festival - Love & Anarchy and in Oslo’s Fusion International Film Festival. The film’s original title, Glasskår, means “shards of glass”, whereas the international title references the wounds we carry with us from childhood. These two elements – glass and wounds, both metaphorical and real - meld together in this movie, which starts out as a run-of-the-mill story about a slightly boring summer which a 16-year-old boy is spending with his grandparents in the countryside, but which ends up sucking its protagonist - with his angelic face and blond curls - into a vortex of degradation, humiliation and masochism which hurts just to watch it.

Tobias (Noa Risbro) is an introverted young man who loves skateboarding and is eager for love. His mother (Iben Dorner) doesn’t have time for him (she’d rather spend it with her lovers) so she sends him to spend the summer with his out-of-town grandparents (Jens Jørn Spottag and Bodil Jørgensen). His grandfather is a glassmaker who teaches his grandson the basics of the profession; his grandmother has dementia, but she gives the boy the little affection his parents fail to provide, given that Tobias’ father (Paw Henriksen) is equally absent: he’s set up home with a new family and has a small daughter who doesn’t like her half-brother being around in the holidays. The summer days seem to drag on forever; there’s nothing to do in the countryside, so Tobias hangs around here and there, between abandoned playing fields, bistros and petrol stations where he meets handsome blond Jonas (Jonathan Bergholdt) - who works as a male sex worker and waits for his clients at a bus stop - and 25-year-old Aron who’s a decent young man and a plasterer-decorator.

The film seems to morph into a Danish version of Call Me By Your Name [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
Q&A : Luca Guadagnino
fiche film] at a certain point, with young Tobias and the more mature Aron attracted to one another but prevented from living out their passion in the light of the hot summer sun. However, after a sudden, unexpected loss, the film takes a different path and slowly ferries its hero from a momentary place of light into total darkness. Tobias feels he doesn’t deserve anything other than suffering, which he also inflicts upon himself. “Our hands are the mirror to our soul”, his grandmother repeats, but Tobias repeatedly harms them. The boy also uses sex - a mercenary and humiliating, vulgar and desperate kind of sex - as a way to feel another kind of pain. In this sense, B.O.Y. Bruises of Yesterday is a film which initially keeps its intentions hidden, which builds up slowly, and which adds to Søren Green’s existing research into loneliness among young people and their inability to verbalise feelings, an issue which the director himself has experienced and which he has previously tackled in some of his shorts. It’s also a film about second chances in life, about the importance of feeling loved and, most important of all, an urgent plea to not leave our adolescents alone with their demons.

B.O.Y. Bruises of Yesterday was produced by Danish firm Asta Film Aps. World sales are entrusted to LevelK.