Listen Up! review – tonally jarring comedy on multicultural integration and teenage trans identity

Here is a highly unusual film. Not because of its subject matter, or its tone, but because of the unlikely marriage between these two things. On the face of it, the plot is that of a sensitive drama exploring the nuances of how multicultural integration in Norway might intersect with identity, particularly as regards transgender kids. The tone, on the other hand, is raucous and often off-putting with crude humour and throwaway references.

The fact that the script’s edgy maxims are casually thrown out by the young lead, Mahmoud (Ahmed Mohammed), compounds the tonal dissonance. Hearing a young Pakistani teenager say things that conjures the same kinds of cinematic universe as provocative turn of the millennium teen franchises such as American Pie is a little jolting to see in a film that is intent on tackling some big issues (and also coming from the lead, who would normally be the voice of reason contrasted with a more provocative secondary buddy character).

Not that the film’s aims are immediately revealed as at all lofty: to begin with it’s a sort of whistle-stop tour of Mahmoud’s personal perspective on his local neighbourhood in Oslo, complete with a section on the differences between Norway and Pakistan, in which we’re treated to a gag about stray dogs in Pakistan eating loose effluent from between Mahmoud’s legs. Likewise, Mahmoud’s perspective on local minorities is broad (“Somalis want nice blazers and legalised khat. Palestinians want to smoke. Iranians want to sit on benches. Turks want to drink tea and watch Galatasaray v Fenerbahçe in their clubs. How are we gonna take over? All we do is chill.”) It’s not the kind of framing that necessarily prepares you for a more or less sympathetic treatment of Mahmoud’s younger sibling coming out as trans, albeit it’s treatment couched in similarly blunt terms and seen through the eyes of a character with zero experience of queer culture.

All this makes Listen Up! something of a curate’s egg – in general the kinds of audiences empathic to the issues faced by trans children are not normally presumed to be the same audience that would find the film’s sweeping would-be comic generalisations about ethnicity amusing. One thing the film does have going for it is an original, unmoulded perspective – and on that basis, it deserves points as a curio in a world where too much film-making is cookie-cutter.

• Listen Up! is on Viaplay from 4 November