An Honest Life’s ending was centered around a final confrontation between Charles’ bandits and Simon. Simon was a law student at Lund University who got mixed up with the wrong crowd the day he set foot in the city. He fell in love with a girl called Max, who introduced him to the anarchist named Charles and the team of thieves that worked for him—Robin, Dinah, and Gustaf. Since Simon wasn’t all that interested in becoming a lawyer, he gravitated towards this modern version of the Merry Men and began fraternizing with them on a regular basis. He officially became a part of the team when he played an integral role in the burglary of a showroom for expensive watches. The next step involved partaking in a robbery at the house of his wealthy roommate, Ludvig, but things went sideways and almost led to the death of the housekeeper, Joyce. Simon was forced by Max and the rest to part ways with them, and he was ordered to never reconnect with them. However, as Simon’s life began to unravel and he realized that he had no future in the world of legal studies, he decided to seek out Max and the rest to attain some form of closure. Did he succeed in this endeavor? Or did he fail and join the long list of lives that Max and the bandits had ruined? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Henrik’s Clues
Simon commenced his search for Max and the bandits by going to Charles, who pointed him in the direction of one Henrik Jonsson and requested Simon to never come back to him again. When he went to the address that Henrik used to stay at, Simon learned that he had gone missing. Assuming that he had hit a dead end, Simon proceeded to leave the apartment, but a roommate of Henrik’s stopped him in his tracks and gave him a bunch of polaroids Henrik had clicked with Max, and also gave him a library receipt—something that Henrik said should be given to the person who came looking for him and was an acquaintance of Charles’. Simon realized two things: firstly, Henrik was the same guy he ran into when he first came to Lund, and secondly, Max had a habit of wooing guys who felt somewhat lost in life so that they could be used as the fall guy when things went sideways.
For both the robberies at the watch showroom and Ludvig’s house, the bandits had recorded footage of Simon so that all the blame could fall on him if the authorities came looking for the guilty party. Something like that must’ve happened to Henrik, which was why he chose to run away from Lund instead of becoming the bandits’ scapegoat. Simon didn’t waste a second and went to the library to check out the book in question, which was Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge, where he found a note. It didn’t take very long for him to figure out that it was a list of the actual names of the bandits, along with their personal contact numbers. Max was Lea, Dinah was Belinda, Robin was Axel, and Gustaf was Gabriel. Henrik probably knew that he didn’t have the time, money, resources, or energy to do anything with that information. So, he trusted the next person who fell in the bandits’ web to complete what he had started.
Robbery in Stockholm
Simon took that list to Charles, but then he found out that he had already killed himself. As soon as Simon thought he had hit yet another dead end, Max called him out of the blue to tell him that she had left the bandits and needed his help. She said that she had booked a room at the hotel called Stiller in Stockholm under the name Bonnot and she wanted to meet him there. Simon knew that it was yet another trap. So, before leaving for Stockholm, Simon wrote down everything that had happened while he was with the bandits in his journal and stored it in the bookshelf in his house, between the books written by James Joyce and William Faulkner. He also gave a vague clue to his sister so that she’d find that journal in case he didn’t make it through the ordeal in Stockholm.
In An Honest Life’s ending, Simon realized that his worst fears had come true as he had been roped into yet another act of rebellion by the bandits. Maria Conti, a billionaire financier, was a guest at the hotel he was in, and it was obvious that the bandits were going to steal something from her and make an example out of her. Instead of immediately revealing that he knew the real identities of the bandits, he just went with the flow, hoping to pull the rug from under their feet at the opportune moment. The robbery was almost over, as the bandits had stolen a bunch of expensive stuff from Conti’s locker and taken humiliating pictures of her. However, in the heat of the moment, when Robin shot the receptionist, Simon had no option but to intervene. Their scuffle led to Gustaf getting shot. The bandits and Simon saw that as their cue to leave, and they jumped in their van and left.
Simon’s Lesson for Max
Max, Simon, and Robin were dropped off at a traffic stop so that they could part ways, probably for the time being. Gustaf was as good as dead, and Dinah was tasked with dealing with his body. Robin fled the scene, while Max went with Simon to a public restroom to get cleaned up. Before Max could use the same trick that she had used after the robbery at Ludvig’s house to get rid of Simon, he turned the tables and finally revealed that he had their names and their personal numbers. He warned her that if she and the bandits tried or even threatened to make him their fall guy again, he’d give all those details to the police. On top of that, he clicked a photo of Max in case the police needed to run facial matches. By doing so, Simon proved that he was done being used, he was taking control of the situation, and he refused to become like Henrik, living life looking over his shoulder. Max tried to explain that Simon’s assessment of how she felt about him was wrong, but she knew that that wouldn’t change the way Simon saw her. So, they just went their separate ways.
Max will probably reunite with Robin and Dinah to get her cut of the take, but Max will never think of seducing another guy like Simon and Henrik so that he could become their fall guy. End of story. With all that out of the way, it’s time to ask the most important question: what was the point of An Honest Life? What was the movie trying to say? Was it trying to say anything at all? Well, for starters, I think these bandits were just a bunch of grifters who were using the socio-political climate of Sweden to make their petty robberies look like acts of rebellion. They didn’t care about sending a message to the rich. They just wanted to steal stuff, sell it to their buyer, and use that money to buy drugs, drinks, and, I don’t know, other stuff that could be labeled as guilty pleasures. All that poetry and philosophizing was utter nonsense. They just did it to convince themselves that their acts of thievery had a higher purpose. They didn’t care about Charles or his anarchist ideology; he gave them a place to stay. When he wasn’t of use anymore, they left him. They didn’t even care that he was depressed enough to kill himself.
A Flawed Ideology
The bandits’ flaws were actually pointed out throughout the movie. Max had sex with Ludvig to get the keys to his house, and when Simon confronted her about it, asking her why she didn’t just ask Simon to get them, Max made it seem like she was compelled to take that route because Simon wouldn’t have stolen them for her. At that point in time, Simon had already started to push back against Ludvig and Victor’s (his other roommate) bullying. So, it was obvious to everyone, except Max, that Simon would’ve definitely stolen the keys to Ludvig’s house and helped them rob the place. That’s odd. Hence, the only explanation is that Max did what she did because she liked to toy around with guys all the time. It was a hobby for her, and that’s what she did; there’s no point in intellectualizing it. Robin was a trigger-happy lunatic. His gun wasn’t an extension of his rebellious spirit or anything like that. He was off his rocker. He needed help. Instead, his friends enabled him to go around robbing places and killing or almost killing people.
After the robbery at Ludvig’s house, when Simon tried to rationalize the crime he had been a part of by saying that the group responsible for shooting Joyce was known for stealing from those who had too much, Ludvig said that Joyce’s job there put her grandchildren through school. So, what did this group prove by shooting her? She wasn’t a flagbearer of capitalism. She wasn’t harming anybody. She was just doing her job so that her next generation would have a future that didn’t involve housekeeping. That pretty much proved that everything about the bandits was disingenuous. The whole “seduce the next fall guy” situation with Henrik and Simon was the icing on the proverbial cake. But yeah, I guess the main point that An Honest Life was trying to get across was that just because “eating the rich” is in vogue doesn’t mean that every self-proclaimed rebel is in the game to teach the wealthy a lesson for widening the economic divide; some of them just want to hurt people. And that just makes me question the filmmakers’ intent.
The movie is ill-intentioned
Look, I don’t know anything about director Mikael Marcimain and writer Linn Gottfridsson. What I am going to say next is not a personal attack on them. It’s just a critique of their art. Here it goes: I think they are two of the dumbest and most idiotic storytellers out there. In this socio-economic climate, if you are an artist who is going out of his way to purposefully misconstrue subjects such as socialism, communism, and anarchy, then I think that that’s just plain stupid. I mean, we have lost track of which stage of capitalism we are in, and it’s clearly not working. I don’t know how things are over in Sweden, but pretty much everywhere else in the world that has wholeheartedly embraced capitalism is facing unemployment, homelessness, debt, horrible infrastructure, unaffordable healthcare, inaccessible education, and more. So, to prop up the rich people in your movie as the victims, while a bunch of delinquents are painted as the face of anti-capitalist sentiment, so that you can say that we should support the wealthy because at least they aren’t gunning down anyone, is dumb as hell. And this isn’t by accident. Everything that you are seeing on the screen is by design. When Simon is bullied by Ludvig, you are supposed to hate them. When he becomes the fall guy for the people who are robbing folks like Ludvig, the movie wants you to think that siding with the class that Ludvig belongs to is so much better than the alternative.
The movie initially wears the mask of “eat the rich,” but the mask quickly begins to slip, and eventually you see it for what it is: a “hate the poor” propaganda film. During the closing moments of the film, I thought that my reading of the film was wrong because the protagonist, Simon, belonged to the working class, and the fact that he was victorious at the end of this whole ordeal and he avenged Henrik was a positive thing. But then I saw Simon’s house and realized that if Mikael and Linn think that that’s what the house of a family that belongs to the working class looks like, of course they think that those around the poverty line are goblins. The good thing about An Honest Life is that it’s irrelevant. Who is going to watch this movie and decide to not sympathize with the poor anymore? No sane person is going to fall for this nonsense. And if they do, they didn’t need this movie to hate on the poor; they were already doing it, and this movie just gave them an extra push to continue on that road to hell. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the ending of An Honest Life. If you have any opinions on the same, feel free to share them in the comments section below.
