Kim Novak Never Swam in Genesaret's Lake

Perhaps surprisingly, the engaging, handsomely-mounted Swedish coming-of-age tale Kim Novak Never Swam in Genesaret's Lake isn't the first fiction feature to include this particular actress's name in its (unwieldy) title – in fact, it isn't even the second. A quick IMDb search yields Italy's Kim Novak is on the Phone (1994) – starring the unlikely combination of Erland Josephson and Joanna Pacula – and Spain's The Semester We Loved Kim Novak which in 1980 provided Almodovar muse Cecilia Roth with some early exposure.
Based on their synopses and titles, the Spanish entry would seem rather closer in tone to this new Swedish arrival, a wistful affair mostly set in the early 1960s and based on a bestselling novel by Hakan Nesser (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Asphaug). There's little attempt to hide the literary origins of the story, narrated by the sixtyish Erik (Johan H:son [sic] Kjellgren) as he travels to the remote lakeside mansion known as 'Genesaret' where as a young teenager he spent a particularly memorable summer.
These modern-day scenes – in which Erik (the Swedish equivalent of a 'baby boomer') explores the house and its surroundings, stumbling across key 'props' triggering particular memories – are a little repetitive, too numerous, and get in the way of the engrossing meat of the movie, set in the same locations four decades earlier: there's a distinct Stephen King-ish vibe to the movie's structure, composed of lengthy flashbacks building up to what the adult Erik ominously calls "the terrible event"…
14-year-old Erik (Anton Lundqvist) – surname Wassman – and Edmund Wester (Jesper Adefelt) have quite a lot in common besides ages and initials: both attend the same school (in an unnamed Swedish town); their fathers are prison guards. And both are discovering the pains and joys of adolescence – their dawning sexuality finding an ideal focus in the shapely form of substitute teacher Ewa Kaludis (Helena af Sandeberg), known as 'Kim Novak' because of her striking Nordic beauty ("the room was heavy with her perfume, and suppressed lust.")
But Erik and Edmund barely know each other until the summer break, when their families send them both to stay at 'Genesaret' under the care of Erik's grown-up, beatnik-writer brother Henry (Jonas Karlsson, facially a cross between Edward Norton and Goran Visnjic). The location is idyllic, the mood laid-back ("carefree… like butterflies on a summer's day") until Ewa unexpectedly turns up in the area along with her macho boyfriend, handball champ Berra 'Cannonball' Albertsson (Anders Berg). The boys know that Berra has a vicious, violent temper – and fear the worst for Henry when he starts seeing Ewa behind Cannonball's back…
Kim Novak… hardly breaks much new ground in terms of plot or character: this kind of lost-innocence, summer-of-love-at-the-lake stuff, with pubescent lads hopelessly desiring an unattainable vision of loveliness ("it was painful to be 14 and know you had seen perfection") might perhaps have seemed somewhat old hat back during the days when Erik and Edmund were teenagers. And while Philip Ogaard's alluringly limpid widescreen cinematography is a pleasure to watch (the forested countryside and Ms Sandeberg alike are very easy on the eye), director Asphaug's conventional style – with every plot development signalled and underlined by Stefan Nilsson's piano-heavy score – is, despite the occasional flight of visual fancy, also somewhat old-fashioned: adding up to the kind of "socially irrelevant" thing that Bo Widerberg tried to shake up back in '63 with his bracingly iconoclastic, nouvelle vague-influenced The Pram.
Asphaug doesn't go for tumultuous "waves" – his Lake is a largely sedate affair, at least on the surface. But with the shadows of death (Erik's ailing mother) and sex seldom far away, there are darker currents lurking below, which occasionally erupt to jarring effect. At around the half-way mark Erik and Edmund see Berra dealing out a particularly unpleasant beating; soon after, they're witnesses to a very different, but equally instructive event: Ewa and Henry getting down to it in the front room at Genesaret. In such frank – if fleeting – sequences Kim Novak… is decidedly Scandinavian: take these two scenes out, and the film would be suitable for even the youngest teenagers.
Their presence is crucial, however, as they are important markers on Erik and Edmund's progress from innocence to experience: a journey completed during that much-foreshadowed "terrible event" which occurs entirely off-camera near the end of the film. Not that we're really in the dark as to what does take place – only the most inattentive viewer will fail to grasp who has done what to whom, and why.
Asphaug's most impressive achievement is the way it agreeable edges from sunny territory into the more ambiguous terrain of the thriller – the whodunnit element skilfully integrated within the broader narrative tracing Erik's transition from boy to man. In a delicate, nicely-handled coda, Erik meets up with Ewa some months after the "terrible event" which affected both their lives deeply – and we see that Erik realises that Ewa isn't really 'Kim Novak' or an 'angel': she's just extremely attractive young woman, a person flesh and blood who can actually be kissed without the heavens being rent asunder.