Something Must Break

Sometimes, nothing can prevent love blossoming. Sebastian’s second encounter with Andreas is punctuated by the latter vomiting after too much booze. It doesn’t put the brakes on the former’s growing passion for the leather-jacketed object of his affections. Soon, the pair are lovers despite Andreas declaring that he is not gay. He cannot resist Sebastian.

The path of love often takes strange turns. In the Swedish film Something Must Break, the roadmap is ripped up. Sebastian (Saga Becker, pictured below right) is androgynous and gay: he is transgender. Although accepting of who he is, Sebastian is searching for a single identity which can accommodate all sides of his character. Andreas (Iggy Malmborg) is more certain of who he is. He is tolerant too. His first encounter with Sebastian is in a Stockholm public lavatory where he saves him from being pummelled by queer bashers. While Sebastian takes things to the edge and beyond, Andreas is a little more measured. Until he gets to know Sebastian, that is.

Although hardly a standard love story, Something Must Break is a tender film handling with deftness questions of identity, isolation and the nature of being an outsider. There are explicit scenes of both Andreas and Sebastian together and of what Sebastian gets up to when he is out on his own. But these are integral to the developing relationship and explaining the constantly searching Sebastian.

As the title states, there is no certainty. The Swedish title Nånting måste gå sönder translates literally as “something has to break”. The match of the UK title to that of a Joy Division song seems a coincidence, but it is apt. Just as Joy Division’s music was imbued with romantic melancholy, so is Something Must Break.

Stylistically, the film carries the mood. Sebastian is almost translucent. It is watery-looking, furthering the feeling that the couple inhabit a world outside society. Shots of them from a distance bring this home even further, although there is a distracting use of point-of-view wobbly cam.

In time, Andreas is revealed to be friends with and a relative of typical middle class people. His lifestyle may be one of slumming it. Once this becomes apparent to Sebastian – who has been able to handle Andreas’s declarations that he is not gay – something does, indeed, have to break. Sebastian’s new persona begins emerging.

Director Ester Martin Bergsmark’s debut feature film is a dreamlike concoction which adapts transgender writer Eli Levén’s 2011 novel Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats. Not only is Sebastian’s new identity named Ellie, but the book dwells on Saint Sebastian. Bergsmark and Levén preceded Something Must Break with the documentary She Male Snails, which centred on the two discussing transgenderdom while sharing a bath. Saint Sebastian also figured in that. As well as referring back to Bergsmark and Levén’s former collaboration, the iconography in Something Must Break is not limited to that of Saint Sebastian: performance artist Malmborg plays Andreas as a James Dean lookalike. Something Must Break emerges as part of a continuum.

Although its concerns about disassociation and identity feel very contemporary, the film does hint at the work of Derek Jarman. It is too early to tell whether Bergsmark is a successor to Jarman, but the sensitive Something Must Break is a very strong marker in the sand.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Something Must Break