It says a lot about this quiet, enigmatic Norwegian film that the main character, Asta (Amalie Ibsen Jensen), almost casually secures a job as a reporter at her small coastal town’s newspaper without the viewer registering much in the way of congratulatory feeling. The job, in fact, seems trivial, like something you’d take on for the summer just to make extra money. Much of the reason for this lack of excitement is the fact that nothing of any consequence really happens in Ålesund’s news cycle except sports and PR gambits, and so when Asta starts pursuing a story about an asylum seeker who was working in a local food processing factory before being forcibly deported you many miss the significance until the story has meaning for her. Asta, who seems to be recovering from some kind of trauma, has moments of acute depression that her lover-roommate, Live (Maria Agwumaro), a furniture repairer/upholsterer, tries to sidestep until she can’t. Of course, there’s a cat, too.

If A Human Position sounds like slow going, it is, though there’s a poignancy to the static shots of the beautiful landscape of the town and Asta/Live’s bare, airy, well-lit apartment. The conversations are often blank and go nowhere meaningful but help signify the relationships on view in ways that more meaningful dialogue wouldn’t (though the comments about Norway’s welfare state are interesting), because these are the kinds of things people talk about to create spaces in which they can survive from day to day. So when the asylum-seeker story presents itself to Asta it gives her own existence meaning, even if nobody else seems to care about it. She needs more than a distraction. She needs to believe in her ability to make a difference, something the trauma suggested she couldn’t do, and which obviously preoccupies her. 

Which isn’t to day A Human Position is a downer. There are moments of subtle humor, as when Live discovers an old electric organ left in the attic and attempts to play a popular tune, that illustrate the title more clearly. As is often said, most of life is spent sitting around and waiting for something to happen, and the director, Anders Emblem, seems uniquely tuned into this credo in showing how Asta not only copes with disappointment, but remains open to the possibility of renewal and even reawakening. The fact that we don’t witness these changes because the movie ends before they happen doesn’t take anything away from Emblem’s purpose. If anything, it makes hope more believable. 

In Norwegian and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

A Human Position home page in Japanese

photo (c) Vesterhavet 2022