Adandonment as Metaphor

My favorite thing about Flickan is how the movie portrays childhood. The main character finds herself in a very extreme situation where there are no adults to care for her, but her experiences in that situation are just more extreme examples of the situation of childhood itself.

Childhood is a very unique time. A lot is exciting because the world is so new, but a lot is scary because children have so little power. The girl in Flicken is extremely excited at being left alone (so much so that she arranges for her aunt to leave and refuses to tell any of the neighbors that she is alone), but she is also scared and in some real danger, as her conversations with Ola about fear and as the question about whether her wound is infected show.

While the girl is unsupervised, great things happen (her friendship with Ola, her sense of responsibility develops, she is able to live exactly as she chooses to live), and bad things happen (her girl friends order her around and torment Ola, she has bowel problems, Ola is seriously injured, etc.). However, any of these events might have happened while her parents were home. Flicken, therefore, does not portray any particularly unusual events, aside from the aunt's abandonment of the heroine, and while that abandonment heightens the opportunity for the girl to have new experiences, it does not actually make her childhood that different from the childhoods of millions of children who were never left unsupervised.