Having recently been invited to a high school reunion I have no overwhelming desire to attend, I suppose I was more prepared than most, emotionally, for the reckoning of Anna Odell’s “The Reunion” — I’d already had the film’s particular fantasy wish-fulfillment on my mind for some time. The notion of storming audaciously into a class reunion with an agenda of psychological revenge, as occurs loudly and messily here, is certainly appealing, and it was difficult to watch Odell stage her grand display of retribution without imagining the would-be satisfactions of my own. I mention this because personal resonance is central to “The Reunion”’s appeal: my affection for the film seems in some sense inextricable from the intensity of the memories it wrested out of me, the decade of resentment its spark reignited, and though I recommend it I should probably add that those who don’t relate to its sentiments may not leave quite so affected. What I can say with some certainty is that the film remains true to experiences and feelings I share. How much pleasure you derive from that truth strikes me as somewhat more contingent. So let’s defer to a cliche: Your mileage may vary.

The vicarious thrills offered by “The Reunion” are on display from the outset. Anna (the writer and director herself, as herself), a well-known Swedish artist and provocateur, arrives late to her twenty-year high school reunion eager to address the crowd with a speech. The virtuoso harangue that follows — part confessional, part confrontation, the lot of it charged with long-harbored animosity —  closely resembles the inciting action of Thomas Vinterberg’s dogme opus “The Celebration”, to which the film has frequently been compared. The key difference is that for Odell, the invective is very much a personal expression: we are bearing witness here to an airing of real grievances, and we are painfully aware throughout that they are being delivered not to the people who matter but to actors meant to embody them. This situation, we sense, is Odell’s private conception of how she relates to the past, an imagined victory she couldn’t realize for real. She tells her classmates that she must do this here and now because there wouldn’t be another opportunity. We understand that it actually goes further: there never was an opportunity. She had to invent one.

For awhile the film seems as if its drama has been orchestrated largely for the benefit of its director — roleplaying toward catharsis, perhaps, or a feature-length cinematic therapy session. But while it’s easy to appreciate the impulse to mount such an exercise, the gratification yielded by this strategy (made available to the director and those who relate to her trauma both) is ultimately rather shallow. Mainly the issue is ease: as much as it pleases us to imagine our triumphs over those who’ve wronged us, there isn’t anything especially productive or enlightening to be gleaned from its depiction. The fallout of Odell’s provocative speech seems to offer a sort of solution to this contention: when the crowd once again turns against its long-time victim and begins their bullying with renewed enthusiasm and contempt, Odell is comfortable putting herself through the fictitious wringer. But it soon transpires that even this is its own kind of victory: aggrieved, accosted, and eventually literally tossed out of the building, she emerges on the moral high ground even as she’s shoved to the floor. As a conclusion this is hardly self-effacing.

Well, such criticisms are, it seems, as apparent to Odell herself as they are to a critical audience, and in fact the film is constructed in precisely such a way to court them before providing a correction. “The Reunion”’s first half, it turns out, was a film within the film — the second half suddenly pivots to show us Odell, in her apartment, putting the finishing touches on what we’ve just watched. What follows is bequeathed the subheading “The Meetings”, and we soon see why: Odell begins reaching out to her real-life classmates by phone to request that they come to her apartment one by one to watch a film she’s made about their reunion. Her class really did have a twenty-year reunion, but Odell, even more an outcast in real life than in the fantasy, isn’t even invited — and this rejection is the impetus for the project as a whole. And so “The Reunion” starts to double back on itself: the classmates show up and watch the film and are interviewed by Odell for their reactions. Her fictional version proves accurate: her classmates are even nastier for real.

As it happens, “The Reunion”’s second half is not a documentary: it is ‘reconstructed nonfiction’, which is to say it is a fictional rendering of events which apparently did happen for real. This approach betrays the depth of Odell’s project. The twist, such as it is, seems less like a gimmick for being more smoothly integrated into the fiction of the whole, while at the same time we’re struck by the veracity of the events taking place. The obvious precedent here is Abbas Kiarostami’s “Close-up”, which likewise used fiction filmmaking as a medium through which real life could be more meaningfully engaged — a mirror, in a sense, through which the truth could be seen but subtly refracted. (“The Reunion”’s methods aren’t quite as sophisticated as Kiarostami’s, of course, but that’s an exceptionally high bar.)

But on the other hand “The Reunion” belongs wholly to its creator — a perceptive and intelligent writer-director and magnetic star, but above all a fascinating subject. That Odell decided to confront an issue this close to her in this fashion betrays, I think, her experience as an artist — it isn’t far removed, in terms of its boldness and capacity to provoke, from her most well-known art project, in which she acted out a mental breakdown on a busy public bridge. That her efforts are so effective, and so affecting, is a testament to the strength of these ideas and the courage of their conviction.

SCORE: 7.7 / 10