'The Drama' Director Kristoffer Borgli's Past Essay About Age-Gap Relationship with Teenage Girl Goes Viral
The Drama director Kristoffer Borgli is facing scrutiny after a past essay he wrote resurfaced online.
The filmmaker, who is best known for directing the upcoming A24 film starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, and the 2023 film Dream Scenario, has gone viral on Reddit after users shared scans of a 2012 article he penned for a Norwegian magazine.
In the essay, Kristoffer reflects on a “May-December romances,” noting that he had a prior age-gap relationship with a teenage girl nearly 10 years younger than him, writing that she was “a girl who wasn’t old enough to vote.”
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He also acknowledged that friends told him the relationship was “not ‘within bounds,’” but he admitted he looked to films for guidance, saying he “had to find something that could recalibrate” his “moral compass.”
The resurfaced piece comes ahead of The Drama‘s highly publicized release. The movie has already courted some controversy over its reported plot twist.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, his essay started circulating more widely online after it was translated from Norwegian.
The outlet notes that he often explores black comedy that “leans into discomfort, taboo and provocation” in his work, themes that are now being revisited in light of the essay.
The legal age of consent in Norway is 16, but as age-gap relationships, and those that form between adults and teens, remains controversial, which is what Kristoffer explores in his essay.
Below is the full translated text from the piece.
Wikipedia lists 266 films that deal with so-called May-December romances.
The term “May-December” is explained here as when the age difference between two people in a relationship is so large that it risks social disapproval. The reason I know this is because I met a girl ten years younger than me whom I liked very much – a girl who wasn’t old enough to vote – and I had to find something that could recalibrate my moral compass. The few friends I confided in about my situation responded that it was not “within bounds. ” That confirmed that it was precisely a May-December romance.
I woke up in the cramped little apartment I was temporarily renting after I moved out – or was thrown out – by my ex half a year earlier. Beside me lay a blonde girl, a high school student enjoying the sporadic holidays in May. I chose to see her that way, to define her by her age, and I chose never to see her again. But you can’t choose what the heart wants. A post on Facebook, a text message, small digital exchanges in the days that followed.
In my previous relationship, the age difference had been in the opposite direction; she had lived seven more summers than me. Age then proved to be more of a problem than an attraction. Emotional dilemmas like these drive me to seek out films and books with similar and relevant themes (and suddenly all songs are about me). Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson portray a May-December romance, aged 53 and 18 respectively, in Lost in Translation. In Ghost World, the age difference between Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch is significant, but it was revisiting Woody Allen’s Manhattan that completely changed my attitude. The relationship there is presented as entirely open and romantic. If a film made in 1979, in which Woody Allen’s 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, is portrayed exclusively in a positive way and causes no controversy in its own time, then why shouldn’t my relationship – with a considerably smaller age difference – in 2012 be “within bounds”? I chose to listen to Woody over my friends.
I was fascinated by her life. Unlike me, she was born and raised in Oslo, in Grünerløkka, and must have been exposed early and clearly to literature, music, and film. When I was 16, I played PlayStation, drank homemade liquor at house parties, and made splatter films in the backyard. She played piano, drank cava at gallery openings, and wrote texts that were published by a press. I think my cultural insight (and therefore, because I am who I am, my life insight) was delayed by ten years as a result of growing up in the countryside versus Oslo. In many ways, we were strangely quite equal. She never laughed at my Seinfeld references – naturally, since she had never seen a single episode – but in return she could recommend books to me, such as Self-Portrait by Édouard Levé.
I could watch her as she read the ever-new books she brought into my apartment. Her curiosity was admirable and contagious. I developed a bigger appetite for everything. Suddenly we were together all the time – long days in my apartment, eggs and bacon with Woody Allen films for breakfast (she was also a fan), long walks with her parents’ dog, and late midweek evenings at restaurants and bars (where they didn’t check ID). When her parents were away, we began spending entire days in their large apartment; we drank her parents’ wine, we read her parents’ books. Some days we didn’t go outside because it was dark (and only then did we get dressed); sometimes we could sit at the large kitchen table from breakfast until dinner without moving, just talking and laughing. She played completely unfamiliar music that I often liked on first listen, and my favorite films became her favorite films. She told me what clothes I should and shouldn’t wear (crew neck, not V-neck). We shared a fascination with Fleetwood Mac, and we both had a childish attachment to peanuts. That summer, I didn’t travel – for the first time as long as I can remember – but the time we spent together that summer in her parents’ apartment was nonetheless the best and most exotic summer I’ve ever had. Her parents came home unexpectedly early from vacation, and I had to climb out the window (first floor). The summer ended, and our weeklong weekends became ordinary weekdays. She was May; I was December.