Lower case title credits usher in a lower case story in Norwegian writer-director Anders Emblem’s second feature, a resolutely muted drama which feels almost like a still-life painting at times, but which nevertheless wrestles with powerful emotions and painful events not visible on screen. Shot with great poise and precision, A Human Position is sometimes frustratingly cryptic, but this flattened style eventually comes to serve as an effective mirror for the depressive mental state of its protagonist. Following its world premiere in Tromsø film festival last month, Emblem’s elegantly spare character sketch made its international debut in Rotterdam’s online edition last week. Slow in pace, slender in length and subtle in tone, this Munch-like study in Nordic melancholy should attract plenty more festival bookings and possible niche art-house business.
A Human Position takes place in Emblem’s hometown of Ålesund on Norway’s northwest coast, a strikingly beautiful harbour community famous for its Art Nouveau architecture and bespoke furniture, and once a key staging post for wartime resistance against Nazi occupation. Amalie Ibsen Jensen, who also co-starred in the director’s debut feature Hurry Slowly (2018), gives a compellingly glum performance as Asta, a young woman with an apparently idyllic life of tasteful Scandi comfort, sharing a stylishly shabby-chic apartment with her cat and her sweetly adoring girlfriend, Live (Maria Agwumaro). But Asta is clearly also dealing with the aftermath of a recent trauma, struggling to reciprocate Live’s tender attempts at affection, and sleepwalking through her new job as part-time reporter for the town’s local newspaper.
There are no grand plot twists in A Human Position, just a few teasing clues. Avoiding potential spoilers as much as possible, Asta’s debilitating melancholia appears to stem from recent surgery and the crushing sense of loss that comes with it. Emblem leaves the full back story purposely opaque but does eventually include one small, quietly devastating reveal. Asta’s slow journey to recovery begins when she learns about the case of Aslan, an asylum seeker who settled in Ålesund, only to be forcibly repatriated after a minor breach of immigration protocol. Turning from disengaged reporter of trivial local news to investigative journalist, she tracks down the co-workers and government officials behind Aslan’s deportation, seeking to understand the petty bureaucratic process behind this casual injustice.
A more didactic film might have gone deeper into the Aslan subplot to highlight the cruel obstacles faced by refugees, even in outwardly progressive and tolerant societies like Norway, in pointed contrast with Asta’s life of relative ease and privilege. For better or worse, Emblem is not interested in lecturing his audience directly on these politically charged themes. Never seen on screen, the ill-fated asylum seeker remains an incidental background detail, his fate included here purely to help the heroine regain a healthy sense of purpose and perspective on her own wounded, broken state. The solidly bourgeois-boho lives of Asta and Live, symbolised by a shared love of vintage furniture, is depicted without any overt critique.
A Human Position is a slight watercolour sketch of a film, a little too understated and underpowered, but beautifully composed and tastefully framed. Besides some gorgeous aerial vistas of Ålesund, cinematographer Michael Mark Lanham fills the screen with pleasing symmetry, handsome architecture and precisely placed vertical divides that invoke Asta’s occluded, dislocated state. A handful of deadpan jokes and recurring feel-good footage of Asta’s cat add some much-needed levity to Emblem’s haunting study of post-traumatic grief, which ultimately becomes a minor-key hymn to the healing power of love.
Director, screenwriter, editor: Anders Emblem
Cast: Amalie Ibsen Jensen, Maria Agwumaro, Lars Halvor Andreassen, Pål Bakke, Kjetil Dyb Lied, Anita Valderhaug, Per Dagfinn Kvarsvik
Producers: Anders Emblem, Stian Skjelstad
Cinematography: Michael Mark Lanham
Music: Eirik Slinning Korsnes
Production company: Vesterhavet (Norway)
World sales: Vesterhavet
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Bright Future)
In Norwegian
78 minutes
