Alma (Helene Bergsholm) is a little gawky, somewhat naïve, and exceedingly horny. In other words, she is a perfectly normal fifteen-year-old girl. She is also predictably disenchanted with life in the dreary Norwegian hamlet of Skoddeheimen, where she and her black-clad, politically radical friend Saralou (Malin Bjørhovde) smoke cigarettes and swig beer at the bus shelter. Only Alma’s elaborate sexual fantasies (and a truly heroic schedule of compulsive masturbation) offer much distraction from her dismal adolescent routine. These fantasies veer from the naïve to the raunchy to the comically bizarre, and have a peculiar habit of entangling everyone she encounters, male and female. The primary object of her desire, however, is Artur (Matias Myren), the squinty-eyed boy who plays guitar for the church choir. It is her lust for Artur that compels Alma to attend a community center mixer one fateful night, where the pair share an awkward encounter. Thereafter, the unfortunate Alma is rather savagely schooled on just how little currency her word has when it clashes with that of a boy, not to mention just how uncomfortable it is for adults to acknowledge that adolescents are sexual creatures.
Turn Me On, Dammit! is the first narrative feature from Norwegian writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, known in her native country primarily for her documentaries. Jacobsen herself adapted the screenplay from a novel by Olaug Nilssen, shaping it into a sort of absurdist erotic bildungsroman, wherein Alma learns first-hand about the sexism and double-standards that afflict adolescent culture (and adult culture, for that matter). The setting might be the green and gray environs of rural Scandinavia, but the tone is blackly, uncomfortably humorous in the fashion of American indie directors such as Tod Solondz and Terry Zwigoff. As in the work of those filmmakers, Turn Me On embraces social and sexual awkwardness for laughs, but the film is ultimately canted more towards realism than satire.
That realism is assisted in great measure by Bergsholm, who uncannily resembles a blonde, adolescent version of Jennifer Carpenter, the lithe, foul-mouthed scene-stealer of Dexter. Bergsholm strikes the right blend of agitation, rashness, and sticky-sweet hopefulness to convince as an emotionally adrift teenage who is just beginning to awaken to the nasty, no-win reality of her circumstances. Although the narrative beats that Jacobsen strikes are thoroughly predictable, Turn Me On does an admirable job of making the political personal, and of highlighting misogynistic cultural phenomena, such as “slut-shaming,” that are too rarely confronted in narrative cinema. This the film does without devolving into a heavy-handed polemic, or abandoning its wry depiction of adolescent despair. That's a nifty feat for a feature that foremost functions as a low-key serving of cringe-comedy chuckles.
