Review: "Turn Me On, Dammit!"

Alma (Helene Bergsholm) is a sex-obsessed, 15 year-old girl living in Skoddenheimen, Norway. Her mother (Henriette Steenstrup) is at wit's end, not knowing just what to do about Alma's constant self-gratification and escalating phone sex bills. Saralou (Malin Bjorhovde), Alma's schoolmate and best friend, wants to move to Texas in order to fight against capital punishment, and writes letters to death-row inmates in her spare time. The two girls envy Saralou's sister, who at college in the big city of Oslo, and have such contempt for their small town that they routinely flip-off the road sign with its name as they ride by it each day on the school bus.

Alma has a crush on the boy down the road, Artur (Matias Myren,) who suggestively pokes her with his naked, male body part at a party one night. What might seem like a dream come true for her turns out to be awkward and unromantic. When Alma returns to her friends with the embarrassing details, the others don't believe her, and Artur denies it when confronted. She is branded a liar and ostracized to the point where even Saralou can't be seen with "dick-Alma."

A film with the title, Turn Me On, Dammit!, may sound like it would be full of graphic material, but it's handled in a sweet, playful way, with very little nudity or actual sex. Alma may be thinking about sex just as often as a boy would, but isn't getting any more action than her sex-crazed, teenage male counterparts. Her hilarious daydreams (featuring just about anyone) feature lots of explicit talk -- things she's used to hearing on the phone-sex line -- but stop short of her getting physical with anyone, except Artur, who appears in much more romantic fantasies.

It's not surprising that the film's director, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, comes from a background in documentary filmmaking (this is her first narrative feature); the visual style is naturalistic and she uses non-actors to fill many key roles, which helps give the film its realistic feeling. Turn Me On, Dammit! is a sensitive, but funny look at a subject that is rarely handled well (or at all) in American film: the burgeoning sex drive of a teenage girl. Too often, all we get is the subject from the male point of view, with the perspective that "scoring" is an exclusively male agenda.

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = B+