Anna (Odell) stands up in front of her former classmates whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years. She has something to say. The class have reconvened for a meal and nostalgia, regaling each other with forgotten stories of fun and antics during their time at school: one guy says that it was 'an innocent time' and that he hopes his children have the same experience he had.
But Anna remembers things differently. She says she was bullied and ignored during the nine years they were together, suffering humiliation on a daily basis. She addresses those who were particularly cruel, those who took delight in convincing her that one of them was in love with her during a camping trip... only for the truth to come out in front of sniggering 'friends'. The more Anna gets worked up, the more the class dismiss her feelings. "We were just kids," they protest. "We weren’t just kids to each other," Anna says.
Tomas Vinterberg’s Festen is the obvious touchstone here. But as Festen used a son’s audacious claim of sexual abuse at the hands of his father at the top of the film as a launch pad to dissect family relations, The Reunion stops and retreats. Just as events turn explosive, and Anna is threatened with violence and physically ejected from the reunion, Odell pulls the rug out from under the audience: this reunion hasn’t gone down - it’s actually a film Odell has made, a wish fulfilment if you will, of what she would love to say to her former bullies.
The Reunion then takes on a docu-drama form, as Odell, the Swedish artist playing herself, seeks out her classmates and invites them to watch the film and then discuss it. Some engage with the process - they express embarrassment and shame or claim to have no memory of Anna’s experiences - while others distance themselves from the project and refuse to cooperate.
The metaphysical different approach is to be applauded and the interviews offer up some squirmy moments, everything that follows the first half hour falls short of the intensity and immediacy that opening sequence generated. Peaking once in a while - like the confrontation with the bully who offers no remorse for his actions - The Reunion doesn’t have anything to match its strong opening.
