Turn Me On, Dammit!

There are plenty of stories out there about adolescent angst and sexual awakening, but few approach their subject matter with the honesty and wit of first-time writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's Turn Me On, Dammit! Helene Bergsholm makes a startlingly accomplished debut as Alma, a smart and pretty teen frustrated with small-town life in the mountains of Norway. She spends a lot of her spare time on a phone-sex line, and indulges in a broad variety of sexual fantasies about her friends and acquaintances. Outside a party, she sees her crush, Artur (Matias Myren), expose himself to her. Did it really happen, or was it another of Alma's fantasies? When she tells her friends, they don't believe her, and, thanks to the jealous Ingrid (Beate Stoefring), Alma becomes a social pariah. She begins to feel that everyone in town thinks she's a sex maniac, and believes that even her own mother (Henriette Steenstrup) is ashamed of her. Jacobsen's film is brashly frank in its depiction of teen sexuality, but there's an underlying warmth and empathy to her treatment of the subject matter. Alma may never feel quite at home in her tiny provincial town, but her realization that there's a world beyond it where she won't feel like such a freak is a well-earned and joyous one.