Nordic cinema always has its place at San Sebastián, most notably in the New Directors section which has been a fruitful launching ground for nascent talent (most recently, Sylvia Le Fanu with the family drama My Eternal Summer). Such talent includes Emilie Thalund, a Danish director making her assured debut with Weightless (Vaegtloes), a finely put together coming-of-age story that should appeal to fans of tales of youthful turmoil (although one scene in particular, exploring the boundaries of consent, may prove too uncomfortable for some despite not showing anything).
First-time actress Marie Helweg Augustsen shines as Lea, a fifteen-year old girl who is spending her summer at a health camp in order to lose weight (European arthouse aficionados may recognize the basic setup as similar to Paradise: Hope, an unusually uplifting Ulrich Seidl film). Surrounded by the beach and forests, and encouraged to be more active thanks to a rule that restricts cell phone usage during daytime hours, she’s motivated to pull off the task, with her outgoing roommate Sasha (the earthily charming Ella Paaske) serving as the ideal reference for what she aspires to physically and in terms of personality.
Sasha also has a habit of overtly and cheekily flirting with the local boys, something Lea is generally uninterested in. In fact, unbeknownst to everyone else, she only has eyes for Rune (the quietly charismatic Joachim Fjelstrup, recently seen in Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein), one of the instructors working at the camp. The two get along swimmingly, which awakens something new within the impressionable young girl, with increasingly complex ramifications as the days pass and she keeps making new progress.
The potentially thorny subject matter is handled very tastefully, as the film makes it clear both characters are awkward about possibly going beyond simple friendship (on the one hand, Lea is of legal age under Danish law; on the other, Rune, in addition to being markedly older, is in what could be interpreted as a position of power). The intricate nuances of attraction and consent fuel the dramatic tension to a sometimes upsetting degree, even though the scenes in question never get as sexually explicit as they may have in a different take on similar narrative circumstances.
Delicately depicting summer as the season of transformation, working in tandem with cinematographer Louise McLaughlin (The Quiet Migration) to capture the minutiae of teenage dreams and doubts on Augusten’s face, Thalund crafts a journey of self-discovery that breezily yet thoughtfully shows the layers of characterization over the course of roughly an hour and a half; it does so before coming to a conclusion that is both dramatically satisfying and, to some extent, spiritually left hanging, much like a real teenager’s continued path of maturation.
As Lea undergoes her coming of age on screen, so does Thalund behind the camera, exhibiting commendable confidence in her approach to a familiar premise that leads to less predictable outcomes. She carefully manages the dramatic weight of the material handed to her by Marianne Lentz’s cleverly layered screenplay, landing on an emotional honesty that keeps proceedings from slipping into contrivance. The protagonist’s journey – or at least the part we’re privy to – may be over in less than two hours, but for the director this is just the beginning, and quite a compelling one.
Director: Emilie Thalund
Screenwriter: Marianne Lentz
Cast: Marie Helweg Augustsen, Ella Paaske, Joachim Fjelstrup, Jessica Dinnage
Producers: Clara Jantzen Kreinøe, Anna Dammegaard Søllested
Cinematography: Louise McLaughlin
Music: Johan Carøe
Sound: Andreas Sandborg
Production company: Snowglobe
World sales: Reinvent Studios
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (New Directors)
In Danish
97 minutes
