Movie Review: “Kiss Me” (Kyss Mig) aka Swedes In Great Sweaters
This is part five of a series in which I will review all of the lesbian movies on Netflix. Even though most if not all of them have been heavily reviewed already, there are many that I haven’t watched. Join me as we go on this journey together. It’ll be super gay at best, unintentionally homophobic at worst, and cringeworthy almost always. | Previous Movie: Princess Cyd
Week 5: Kiss Me, 2011. Dir. Alexandra-Therese Keining.
Netflix Synopsis: When Mia attends her estranged father’s engagement party and meets her soon-to-be stepsister, sparks fly and Mia unexpectedly falls in love.
Swedish writer-director Alexandra-Therese Keining’s film Kyss Mig (released in English-speaking countries as Kiss Me or With Every Heartbeat) has a reputation of being one of the better female queer movies available. Legend has it that it’s one of the least campy out there. But in a film canon that sadly doesn’t feature the most prestigious of works, it’s easy for that reputation to not mean much and for “not campy” to still be painful. Luckily for Keining, neither are the case for Kiss Me, a film that is not just the best of the worst, but legitimate and fulfilling.
Though fully qualified to boast an additional title of Swedes with Great Sweaters, Kiss Me actually centers around Mia (Ruth Vega Fernandez) and Frida (Liv Mjönes), soon-to-be step sisters who meet each other at the engagement party for their father and mother, respectively. Frida flies solo, and Mia arrives with recent fiancé Tim, who awkwardly, and, given the setting, questionably announces their newly impending nuptials to the crowd. Lasse is elated to celebrate his estranged daughter’s engagement. Mia, it seems, is embarrassed to even be there.
Mia carries this wariness of her own state of being throughout the first part of the film, and the impression that her romance with Tim might be contributing to this hesitation is apparent from the very beginning of Kiss Me when it opens with an upside-down shot of the two having sex. This is the only time the film employs this angle, and it pointedly and effectively injects the relationship with a vulnerability that foreshadows its looming downfall. And though both parties seem to be none the wiser to this peculiarity, the audience is immediately unsure of the union. This unsteadiness only grows as the film progresses, and the vague sense that Mia’s commitment to Tim is performative becomes palpable from this moment forward. She’s not lying to us or really even to herself— she’s not quite aware that there’s anything to lie about. Nonetheless, the moment she lays eyes on Frida, her life changes.
The catalyst of this change is of course the quintessential Longing Lesbian Look From Across the Room that Frida delivers while Mia and Tim kiss. The look, as well as Frida’s sexual orientation, go completely over Mia’s head, who later gives very gay Frida grief for maybe sleeping with her brother Oskar. It’s family and it’s gross, says Mia. “It’s not like we have the same parents,” Frida retorts with a twinkle in her eye as she smirks in her step-sister’s direction.
It is on an island at the family summer house where we see Mia and Frida’s first kiss (and also Mia’s first Great Swedish Sweater). Surprisingly, Mia makes the first move. “Why’d you kiss me?” Frida probes, a question that Mia answers with another lip-lock and then an attempt at a quick escape. But despite her best efforts, she can’t get off the island until the next morning. So the next logical step is obviously to make out again, only this time after stripping down to their underwear and going swimming in a nearby lake. Somehow, Mia is surprised to learn that Frida is gay. Frida is equally as surprised to learn that Mia didn’t know she was gay. “Why did you kiss me?” Frida presses again. Like clockwork, Mia summons the expert avoidance skills of any closeted queer by insisting that she loves Tim and is “not like” Frida. Then she runs away.
Mia is so decidedly “not like” Frida that she runs away all the way into her bed later that night, where the two have some pretty convincing gay sex that is notedly and importantly not shot on an inverted angle. They are adorable and loving until rescue off the island comes by way of Tim and a pickup truck, and Mia soon finds herself ashamed, unsure, and quite literally stuck between the two.
The rest of Kiss Me is a visually compelling and generally well-written exploration of Mia’s newly discovered bisexuality and the love triangle she finds herself in because of it. It is one of the most non-campy films available to the female-identifying LGBTQ community; it feels like a movie about queer women rather than a Queer Women Movie. It has its flaws, the most glaring ones being the presence of a fair share of tropes — there’s an “I can’t do this!” moment, some relationships painfully end due to the hero romance, and there’s some cute homophobia. But what it lacks in these aspects it very much makes up for in others: Mia is acknowledged and respected as a bisexual, there are nuanced discussions about sexual orientation and bigotry, and the queer characters are not caricatures.
Despite its flaws, Kyss Mig is an uplifting and enjoyable queer story. It is a legitimate film about relationships and the people in them who just happen to be not heterosexual. Keining focuses on telling a human story first and gay story second and thus refreshingly avoids vilifying the queerness of her main characters. As a result, her film is indeed one of the best available in the Lesbian Film canon. It wouldn’t hurt American filmmakers to take a page out of the Swedes’ book on queer cinema. And maybe a page about the their sweaters, too.
FINAL TALLY
Gays Buried: 0
Queer Director: Unknown
Queer Writer: Unknown
Queer Actor(s): No
Watch Kiss Me
Next movie: Concussion
