THE OPINION OF “THE WORLD” – TO SEE
She is 18 and goes unnoticed. Her face with childish curves, her pale blond hair, her silhouette hidden under shapeless clothes contribute to this erasure. The first images do not help, which seem to dissolve her into the decor. That of a standard and soulless company where she cleans. In the next room, a team drinks champagne. Despite the glass partition, no one pays attention to Elba (Camilla Godo Krohn), decidedly transparent. And soon hidden.
A few minutes later, we discover her in her small apartment located in the basement of a house in an upscale neighborhood of Oslo. The couple who live there are getting ready to go on vacation and ask their young tenant to watch over the property while they are away. They have barely crossed the portico when Elba enters the place. From the terrace overlooking the gardens of the other villas, she observes a group of young people partying around a swimming pool. She imagines herself among them and talks to them, like a little girl would with her dolls. From now on, Elba invents a life for herself.
The Finnish-Swedish director Johanna Pyykkö makes perfect and disturbing use of this material that mixes reality and lies, gradually building around her heroine a sort of theater of shadows and chimeras – a reflection of a mirror to larks where everyone questions themselves and gets lost. The characters and the spectators. My perfect stranger is a manipulative film that takes pleasure in transforming, seemingly out of the blue, what initially appears to us as a fantasy into a disturbing pathology.
Game of deception
This settles in with the arrival of another character, a young, attractive Bulgarian (Radoslav Vladimirov) whom Elba comes to help, after finding him in a parking lot, with a wound on his head and amnesia. A godsend for the young woman who, after bringing him back to her rich home, makes the stranger believe that she has been his girlfriend for several months. With this charming prince fallen from the sky, Elba’s dream life reaches its ideal.
What follows depicts an encounter that is constantly prolonged, increasingly random and threatened as it progresses. An encounter that, backed by a game of deception, far from helping the characters understand each other, makes them evade it. In the same way, reality, when in contact with fantasy, ends up merging with it. It is then a mental space that is illustrated in this closed room whose foundations crumble and tremble at the slightest intervention from off-screen. Johanna Pyykkö masters the exercise, nimbly mixing realism and dreaminess, opening several drawers at will, to better confuse the tracks. And this, until the denouement.
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