As refreshing as a dip in a cool lake on a hot summer day, The Swedish Torpedo deftly kicks away from the usual conventions of the sports drama. Based on the true story of Sally Bauer, the first Swedish woman to swim the English channel, director Frida Kempff uses the biopic as a Trojan Horse to explore the cruelty inflicted on women when they dare to have ambition. A stirring picture, told with conviction, The Swedish Torpedo finds the personal victory in an athletic achievement.
It’s 1939. The radio burbles incessantly with the latest news about Adolf Hitler. Sally’s (Josefin Neldén) sister Carla (Lisa Carlehed) has suffered another miscarriage. As a single mother, Sally is doing all she can to care for her young son Lars (Arthur Sörbring), while her exasperated mother (Gunnel Fred) wants her to enroll in housewife school. Yet, despite a looming war, and a growing pile of domestic problems, all Sally can think about is one thing: swimming the English Channel. It’s with these straightforward narrative goalposts that Kempff and Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten craft a sturdily composed screenplay that is as much about Sally’s journey as a study of both the visible and invisible shackles of patriarchy.
Freeing themselves from the obligation of getting lost in the weeds of swim world mechanics and statistics allows Kempff and Hausswolff to give the spotlight to Neldén, and she wields it well. Her performance — both impressively physical and deeply moving — deserves to be an international breakthrough for the already well-regarded Swedish actress. Nelden imbues Sally with flinty and vulnerable spirit, creating an admirable determination to be a parent and champion, even if it seems absurdly impossible. It’s once again the well-written script that gives Nelden so much room to find Sally, and all her flaws and convictions, but without losing sight of the fact that in breaking barriers, she nearly breaks herself in the process.
Opening its view well beyond the Baltic Sea and English Channel, there are no training montages or inspirational monologues in The Swedish Torpedo. It takes nearly an hour for Sally to complete her qualifying swim of the Kattegat and it’s the most biggest and most cinematic sports moment in the picture. Then, it takes until just before the film rolls credits for Sally to step into the channel off the Cliffs of Dovers. It’s almost to the point of afterthought that Kempff cares about the sports elements of the picture, and its the better for it. The filmmaker trusts that the audience doesn’t hold the outcome in doubt, and instead leads them through a different, and more interesting direction.
It’s in these wide storytelling spaces where she prefers to explore and give space to small, but affecting subplots that illustrate the suffocating cultural waters that Sally and women like her faced. Whether it’s the tragic friendship Sally strikes up with a fellow student at school, or the absolute humiliation she faces in a meeting with sponsors following her Kattegat swim, these sequences as impactful as the expected triumphs.
The Swedish Torpedo is a reminder that sometimes the endurance required to make history and fulfill your purpose is sometimes more trying than the goal itself. Five days after Sally Bauer made it across the English Channel in 15 hrs 22 minutes war broke out. What the film doesn’t you is that in 1951, Sally did it again, this time with an even faster time of 14 hrs 40 minutes. It seems the world needed to catch up with Sally Bauer, but it’s clear she wasn’t going to wait around for that to happen.
Director: Frida Kempff
Screenplay: Frida Kempff, Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten
Cast: Josefin Neldén, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Arthur Sörbring, Lisa Carlehed, Gunnel Fred
Producers: Erik Andersson, David Herdies, Michael Krotkiewski
Cinematography: Hannes Krantz
Production design: Elle Furudahl
Costume design: Eugen Tamberg
Editing: Julie Naas
Music: Martin Dirkov
Sound: Louis Storme
Production companies: Momento Film (Sweden), Amrion, Inland Film Company (Finland), Velvet Films, SVT (Sweden), TV4 (Sweden), Film i Väst (Sweden), RTBF (Belgian Television), Proximus (Belgium)
World sales: Urban Sales
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Centrepiece)
In Swedish, Danish, English
120 minutes
