Turn Me On, Dammit! | Review

I Am Curious…Colorblind: Jacobsen Manually Depicts Teenage Code

There’s many a coming of age tale about young women, but, as if often the case, the depiction of female sexuality and female pleasure is often vaguely addressed or circumvented altogether (especially in the heterosexual coming of age tradition). Not so with Turn Me On, Dammit! , the fictional film debut of Norwegian filmmaker, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen. Unapologetic in its telling about one very horny female teenager, Jacobsen’s debut is enjoyable but also notable for its frank and unexaggerated depiction of teenage social codes.

Alma lives alone with her mother (Henriette Steenstrup) in Skoddeheimen, Norway. At the tender age of 15, she’s a roiling bundle of hormones, having sexual fantasizes about nearly every one she lays her eyes on, whether it’s her girlfriends, her boss at the supermarket, or, especially, her schoolmate neighbor, Artur. While at a party with her friends, the sisters Ingrid and Saralou, Artur approaches Alma while she’s alone, and, after taking his erect penis out of his pants, pokes her with it. But after nonchalantly telling her friends immediately afterward, Ingrid (who secretly has a crush on Artur) accuses Alma of lying, and thus, a rumor is born that Alma lied about getting poked with a dick, resulting in her ostracization and the nickname Dick-Alma. Meanwhile, Alma’s mother has discovered that her daughter has a voracious (and expensive!) appetite for phone sex and loud night time masturbation, which she has no idea how to handle. Abandoned by her friends, unable to speak with her mother, and the boy she loves not stepping forward to tell everyone the truth, Alma runs away to Oslo for advice from an older, wiser, close friend.

If you’re reminded of the controversial 1967 Swedish film, I Am Curious Yellow for subject matter and geographical comparison, perhaps the word ‘curious’ should clue you in as to how Jacobsen’s Turn Me On, Dammit! is really a blunt, matter-of-fact story about a girl that’s simply horny all the time and likes to masturbate. Helene Bergsholm gives an intelligent and moving performance, and with its slight running time of 76 minutes, there’s not much room for complaint. If anything, Jacobsen’s film is almost too slight and could have even benefited from more backstory with Alma’s mother.

Sadly, there’s no American counterpart for the young Alma, unless it’s a female depicted demeaningly or as an abnormal subject. While 2010’s Easy A may come to mind, even Emma Stone’s intelligent heroine isn’t shown to find sex ‘pleasurable,’ though, for comparison’s sake, the power of the rumored sexual innuendo certainly seems to change one’s social standing no matter your whereabouts. But in a country where we have What’s Your Number? (2011) with Anna Faris desperately trying to keep her sexual partner count under 20 because she read that anything over that number means you’re a brazenfaced hussy (taken from a Marie Claire mag, of all places) the unabashed and frequent masturbation fantasies of Alma seem revolutionary and perhaps the most sex positive depiction of a healthy hetero female that a young lady could see.

On paper, Jacobsen’s film may seem to court provocation, but her film is charmingly unobtrusive. But with subtle commentaries about what marriage and family mean for a woman and criticism of capital punishment in Texas (not as random as you’d think) which would make Werner Herzog proud, Turn Me On, Dammit! also isn’t as straightforward as it appears to be.