Popular culture is full to the reinventive brim with people forced, through all kinds of coercive circumstance, to remake their lives.
Some do it willingly not, many not, but the pattern is always the same – chaos as the old is swept away and the new come crashing in, and a reassuring reminder, assuming you find this kind of thing reassuring (many do not, preferring stability, however, odious to change) that life doesn’t have to fossilise in place.
In most books, TV shows and movies, it all ends rather well but the getting there is tough and this is more than apparent in Tuesday Club (Tisdagsklubben), a Swedish film which sees Karin (Marie Richardson) a woman of 40 years standing, who has devoted her life to her sometimes oafish but seemingly loving husband Sten (Björn Kjellman) and her soon-to-be 40-year-old daughter Frederika (Ida Engvoll), sacrificing her dream of being a professional cook in the process.
She’s not unhappy, but you get the sense she’s not ecstatic either, caught in that sluggish slipstream of the known and the easily quantifiable, the kind that is neither good nor bad but which is, after a considerable time of something existing, like a longstanding marriage, just is.
As the film opens she is busying herself with cooking up a gastronomic storm, readying her home for the arrival of close friends and family to celebrate her 40th wedding anniversary, an event which, at first, goes off without a hitch.
That is, until, rather dramatically and sort of comedically, she discovers that Sten is having an affair, something that comes unpalatably to light when her husband’s phone pings with a text in the kitchen when she’s preparing the cake for dessert and she sees the kind of salacious pic that’s clearly not intended for a G-rated audience.
She’s understandably furious but before she can do anything about it, Sten, trying to prove he is still in full possession of his virile manhood (self-proclaimed naturally) injures himself and Karin’s life enters a bizarre netherworld where she knows her marriage is over but it’s also not with Sten, in hospital recuperating from his injuries, in no real position to have the kind of heart-to-heart this kind of revelation the smart phone-driven revelation demands.
It’s actually a fairly serious situation but Tuesday Club (Tisdagsklubben) handles it with a deft comedic touch too, neatly balancing the existential horror of finding out that life as you knew it is over with the tantalising sense that maybe what lies ahead is so bad after all.
In quick order, Karin, newly-reunited with old gregarious school acquaintance Monika (Carina M. Johansson) and as close as ever with school bestie Pia (Sussie Ericsson), finds herself unexpectedly in a new found family, bonding with her fellow cooking classmates in a Tuesday night course that Monika talks her into enrolling in.
After the emotional deaths of the first part of the film as Karin grapples with the loss of her marriage, a lack of closeness with her daughter who’s deeply unhappy to be single and unsettled at the grand old age of 40, the middle part of the film features the sweet, sweet joy of finding that maybe life can come alive again, after all.
Much of that is courtesy of Pia and Monika, her gal pals in the Tuesday Club they form in the wake of Karin’s change of circumstance and Monika’s uncertain return to her hometown, and the chef teaching the course, Henrik (Peter Stormare), with whom Karin clashes repeatedly at first, a sure sign in rom-com land, and rest assured Tuesday Club (Tisdagsklubben) is a fervent, trope-devoted member of this wondrously romatically idealised place, that they will fall head over heels in life-renewing love.
Subtle and unpredictable this film is not, but it takes all the usual constituent pieces and has a great deal of well-written (thanks to Anna Fredriksson), superbly acted and expertly directed by Annika Appelin fun, leavened by some soul-searing introspection dramatic thoughtfulness, with what can happen when your life falls apart in wholly unplanned fashion.
It is, for all the pain and loss on display, a hugely enjoyable film because it injects a sizable chunk of affecting humanity into the comedic twists and turns – the way in which Karin and Sten resolve their will-they, won’t-they end their marriage after his return home is a thing of hilarious beauty, beautifully and with a raw forgiveness at its heart that is substantial and rare in often lighter-than-air rom-coms – and in so doing makes you invested in what happens to Karin, her new friends from cooking class, Pia and Monika, Frederika and yes even Sten, who all somehow end up in a great interlinked community of people who find themselves forced to move on and who end up doing so in ways that delight and surprise them.
Predictable though much of the film is, it feels fresh, real and original, a fairytale of newness and reinvention that might be packed full of happy coincidence and neatly-arranged outcomes, but which feels like something heart-affirmingly alive and real.
Tuesday Club (Tisdagsklubben) is a delight to watch, to lose yourself because all of the characters, bar petulant Frederika at times and Henrik in his first few prickly, primadonna scenes, are a joy to spend time with – Pia and Monika are the perfect, supportive and reasonably well fleshed-out besties, the cooking gang including sweet novice cook, plumber Grizzly (Klas Wiljergård) are exactly who you’d want to help distract from the ashen mess of your life, and Henrik, once the screenplay allows him to warm up and soften, and become appealingly vulnerable, is the epitome of the new man poised to remake, reinvent and restore Karin’s life.
On paper, Tuesday Club (Tisdagsklubben) isn’t wildly original but what it lacks in innovation and difference – to be fair a good, no great rom-com, should be a slave of sorts to its genre or its missing the point of its existence – it more than makes up with a vitality of found community, a comedic sensibility that is as heartfelt as it is hilarious, and characters so richly alive and approachable that you want them all to be happy because if they can be happy after the worst happens to them, so can you, and in a world that often feels cruelly cold and unforgiving, that something of which it’s always good to be reminded.