Young Simon learns the Latin phrase “Ex Liga Libertas,” “from the law comes freedom,” on his first day at law school in Lund, Sweden.
But hanging out with anarchists, listening to their “always be drunk” Baudelaire rules for living and immersed in their love for Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” changes his attitude.
Maybe the law isn’t about “freedom,” after all.
And “Nine semesters to learn the rules, a lifetime to apply them” doesn’t sound like much of a future.
“An Honest Life” is a Swedish dip into the extreme politics some sample when they’re young. For most, it’s a passing fad like Ayn Rand, libertarianism, manga and heavy metal. But to some, living by your wits, your “opinion and actio must be the same” idealism and your ability to rationalize every crime you commit as against “the system” has a lasting appeal.
Just so long as you don’t mind a life on the lam.
“Honest” is a slow-footed thriller about anarchic crime, anarchist “honey trap” recruiting, finding a “story worth telling” and maybe standing up for yourself and growing up in the process.
Simon (Simon Lööf), an aspiring writer who “settled” for law school, voice-over narrates his anti-heroic journey. He voice-over narrates his interior life. And as is the case with many a novel-turned-film voice-over narrated to death, he voice-over narrates the obvious.
“I’ve always been the best in my class,” he muses. “But here, everyone is the best.”
His life changes when he stumbles into a student nation protest that turns into a riot. He warns that masked, hooded anarchist spray painting “They have ships, we have waves” on a wall that a cop is charging up on her. He and the cop end up injured. But even masked and hooded, he can recognize the anarchist Max when he spies her in the library.
Simon is courted and perfunctorily recruited and added to Max’s anarchist cell. We know this because the film’s opening scene has him lured into a jewelry store and tricked into participating in a robbery.
“This is your test,” Max’s voice on the cell phone she left behind on the watch counter tells him.
The movie that precedes that robbery and the one that follows it are two halves of a fairly pedestrian affair — a naive kid lured by a confident, sexy woman into a world his circumstances dictate that he might be interested in, even if skinny dipping, cliff-diving and sex with an alluring older woman wasn’t part of the deal.
Simon rents a room in a townhouse of the super rich, rooming with insufferable privileged posh boys who treat him like a servant. “I want what they have.”
His disillusionment with the law begins with “boredom,” and grows when he sees how into it his myopic classmates are about it. His recruitment seems complete when he meets and hears out the old academic (Peter Andersson of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” films) who is a sort of godfather to these anarchists — propped up by the sales of their stolen property, tolerated for his aged idealistic agitprop.
“They’re predators,” he warns Simon. To little avail.
Simon is destined to find out how true that warning is as he is pulled in over his head by ruthless idealogues who have curdled into hardened criminals.
Rios makes a generically beguiling temptress, and Lööf adds little new to the law student somewhat undone by all he’s exposed to narrative in this “Paper Chase” meets “The East” mashup.
Mikael Marcimain’s direction of the action beats is never more than passably exciting. And an honest take on “An Honest Life” might be that everything between those robberies, riots and burglaries just reminds you that there aren’t enough robberies, riots and burglaries to keep one awake through all that tedious voice-over narration.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sex, profanity
Cast: Simon Lööf, Nora Rios, Peter Andersson and Nathalie Merchant.
Credits: Directed by Mikael Marcimain, scripted by Linn Gottfridsson, based on a novel by Joakim Zander. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:02
