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The Drama, the forthcoming A24 movie by Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, tells the story of a couple, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson), who make the mistake of confessing the worst things they’ve done in their lives to each other. It’s a fitting premise within the larger scope of Borgli’s filmography, which often digs into social acceptability, what people are “allowed” to do, and who determines that. His first two films, DRIB and Sick of Myself, contended with the ever-harmful nature of the attention economy and what people do when they can’t get enough of a public eye that might hate them. His American breakthrough, Dream Scenario, a movie about a man who appears in everyone’s dreams through no fault of his own, was a condemnation of cancel culture in America. The Drama is a more localized version of the same thing: If you do something bad (or almost do something bad, or do something bad out of your own control), how mad should people be at you — really?
It’s a question that’s now being reflected back on Borgli himself after an essay of his from 2012 originally published in D2, a Norwegian newspaper, started to make the rounds. In the essay, Borgli, then 26, details a May-December romance he had with a girl ten years his junior. While the age of consent in Norway is 16, Borgli’s essay notes that the gap “risks social disapproval.” Despite the judgment from his friends at the time, Borgli writes that it was revisiting Woody Allen’s Manhattan that gave him the grace to keep going. “If a film made in 1979, in which Woody Allen’s 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, is portrayed exclusively in a positive way and causes no controversy in its own time, then why shouldn’t my relationship — with a considerably smaller age difference — in 2012 be ‘within bounds’? I chose to listen to Woody over my friends,” he writes.
In both Dream Scenario and The Drama, Borgli sides with the maligned, framing those who cast judgment as shrewish and needling (exemplified in The Drama with a deliciously irritating performance from Alana Haim). While Borgli’s article predates the current mood on Allen and the Me Too movement in general, as a student of cinema, he surely knows that not everyone will agree with the idea of listening to Allen over one’s friends. No doubt in writing something like his May-December essay, Borgli almost certainly wanted to ruffle some feathers when he described showing his then-teenage girlfriend Seinfeld for the first time. It could be that Borgli, who comes from a background in advertising, knows there may be no such thing as bad publicity.
The Drama is already poised to court controversy (but we won’t risk the idea of “spoiling” Zendaya’s confessed sin) — that Borgli’s unsavory essay is making the rounds might not be purposeful, but it’s not exactly out of line. His essay is far more playful than it is romantic. He’s not trying to convince us of the relationship’s dignity so much as he is ribbing on a theme, scarcely sad when the fling comes to an undramatic conclusion. He’s laughing at us, maybe, even more than we’re scolding him. That’s not to defend his piece but rather to consider the context from which all his work stems.
That is not to say that his alleged pleasures aren’t arguably serious or even sincere. “What was interesting to me was the preconceived notion of someone, the misconstrued image of someone, the idea of persona and person not matching up,” Borgli told Vulture around the time Dream Scenario was released. The existence of such an essay seems to affirm his tendency to poke at discomfort rather than show us a different side of the director we’ve not seen before. When asked about leveling up to bigger movies and bigger stars, Borgli said it was important for him to be public for his “ideas” and not who he was as a person. “That way,” he said, “I’m in control.”
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