Lilja Ingolfdottir’s debut feature Elskling is so good, we just have to pull it apart!
P. Stuart Robinson (b. 1958), is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Tromsø. He writes academically about the politics of film, and has published in such scholarly journals as Alphaville, Apparatus and Nordlit.
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KVIFF 2024: Lilja Ingolfdottir’s first feature, Elskling («Loveable») premiered this month at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and it just so happens it’s a masterpiece. The greater the work, the more questions raised of what might have been, however. So let’s talk about the boundaries and the quandaries of true greatness!
For a start off, Ingolfdottir’s A-list festival debut came to Karlovy Vary and cleaned up almost every prize going: Best Actress, FIPRESCI, Special Jury Prize, Ecumenical and Europa Cinema Label Awards. Perhaps even more significantly, it received a prolonged standing-ovation at its premiere. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, how could it miss out on the biggest prize of all, the Crystal Globe for best film? Maybe this is a good place to start, with a puzzle, otherwise I’d just be fawning like a love-sick fan. The torrent of praise is probably already wearing a bit thin, however well deserved. There must be some flaws after all, so let’s take a closer look.
Lovebirds Sigmund and Maria get married and have kids, to add to Maria’s two from a previous relationship. Inevitably, life gets tougher, with kids to raise, careers to develop. Frictions come to the surface. This is a thoughtful, realistic relationship study, asking difficult questions about its flaws: Why did Maria see Sigmund as such a catch in the first place, and what does this tell us about her, what makes her tick?
Here is where the film gets interesting. The couple-drama is deepened and intensified by the psychological dissection of Maria in all her complexity. In the process the film achieves a remarkable equipoise, maintaining both dramatic momentum and reflective depth.
From the very start the spectator is drawn, swiftly and irresistibly, into a complex, highly personal ‘reality.’ Our meeting with Maria, played by Helga Guren, establishes an immediate psychological intimacy combined with extraordinary narrative momentum. We are inside her head, sharing her memories, and they roll out with the urgency of a good music-video or the Mission Impossible franchise at its most frantic. It’s operation ‘Catch Sigmund’ – the fun, handsome, popular one that everyone adores.
The hook that draws us in so effectively is Maria the narrator. But wait! Didn’t somebody say «no narrators» at film school? Well, Ingolfsdottir dares to be another exception – like film noir – that proves the rule. This is deft montage, turbo-charged with appropriate romantic music. She tells in fast-paced words and images how they met, how she knew he was the one, how she made him hers – against all the odds. For the spectator it already feels legendary, and thus also tinged with the melancholy overtones shared by most things past-tense.
For the well-oiled opening, we learn as the film unfolds, is only a sort of overture. The operatic overtones are entirely apropos. It sits as a nicely compact prelude, foreshadowing the action to follow. Indeed, we are given a faint but unmistakable whiff of the very mood of that lurking behemoth, the narrator’s present. We already sense her sense of loss. We already know this is all destined to go horribly wrong; we just don’t know how yet. Then, the clock trips forward and we land with a jolt in the present, as though rudely awakened from a lovely dream.
The contrast is striking. We ‘wake up’ in the grocery store with the juggling act of shopping with kids in tow that any single parent will recognise with a sigh. Maria is not a single parent, however. She’s left holding the fort while hubby is away on business – again! Her frustration is compounded by the complicity of her own stalled career, of feeling trapped by her own failures. Here are the foundations of a full-fledged relationship drama, laid economically with telling light and shade. The momentum of fond reminiscence is contrasted with the relentless drag of toil and obligation. The music falls silent, along with the narrator and her narrative agenda.
A struggle with the centrifugal forces of blame and anger follows. This is convincing and engaging, but it’s the psychological depth that really captivates. The fault-lines of a relationship and its cognitive architecture begin to emerge, to the point they become discernible even in the opening montage. Was it really love’s young dream, even at the beginning? In retrospect, wasn’t she a little too desperate, a little too determined that what completed her was him? What did that say about her, and her own self-image? As Maria herself puts it herself in a moment of despair, what was best about her was him! And what of Sigmund (Oddgeir Thune) himself? Wasn’t he a little too easily snared, too ready to go with the flow and bend to the will of others, especially when it seems like the easy option?
We had already sensed reality lurking somewhere in the background like the ominous gravitational pull of unwanted morning, and now it’s here with a vengeance. Layers of meaning progressively unfold. This will require an occasional recap: reflection and memory will intrude once more. Indeed, one critical, emblematic moment – let’s call it The Homecoming – will be revisited again and again, and we, the fascinated audience, will gladly follow. We are truly inside Maria’s head now, and we cannot resist the bitter-sweet adventure of her psychic-social journey. We join her at that fateful turning-point, trying as hard as Maria herself to figure out how it all went wrong.
A momentary joy of reunion quickly gives way to a full-boiled row. At first sight we can see both sides: He abandoned her, but hadn’t they planned this together, out of necessity? She is understandably frustrated, but isn’t she overreacting? Each return to this critical juncture brings a clearer picture of the history and dynamics at work and deepens its significance. Maria – and we – begin to understand that here, as on other occasions, she felt compelled to make him feel bad, but why…?
Elskling might seem, at first sight, like a common-or-garden romantic drama, but it is so much more than that. The relationship in crisis is the vehicle for a minute dissection of the trials and tribulations faced by us all, as we strive to make sense of our lives and how we relate to the other humans populating our life world. The film dissects how and why it can be so hard to understand our own actions and feelings, and how it may be even harder to like – or love – ourselves.
The best thing about Elskling, which I continue to struggle so hard to unpick, is the character-study of Maria through the vehicle of her realistically portrayed life-in-motion. The filmic tools are a versatile, shifting narrative, sharp dialogue, and an absolutely inspired acting performance by Helga Guren. This is exemplified by a sort of ‘road to Damascus’ moment where, alone in the mirror, she metaphorically and literally faces herself and tries to rebuild a shattered self-esteem. The powerful cinematography and emotional intensity of the performance combine to produce an evocative portraiture in close-up, reminiscent of some of Steve McQueen’s most striking imagery, in Shame (2011).
But let’s see if we can pick apart the knot at the heart of the film, the conundrum hidden in the ‘perfection’ of its immensely satisfying dramatic resolution. Well, for a while there the protagonist wasn’t just a specimen with psychological issues but the personification of human frailty and hence a problem with no solution, even with the best will – and therapist – in the world. The one featured (Heidi Gjermundsen) makes a terrific candidate: subtly, gently, intelligently, she helps Maria see things and herself differently. However abstract, this psychological journey manages to become something compelling, even exhilarating, and yet… And yet I felt the tiniest twinge of doubt or ambivalence about precisely this part of the story.
Human, contradictory Maria, in all her chaotic reality, becomes a problem to be fixed, like faulty wiring in need of a technician’s help. Reformed Maria is just a little too neat and tidy, like a portrait whose extraordinary complexity has been airbrushed over in the interests of a pre-conceived model of perfection. I feel a lyric from Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965) coming on: ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ The point was that this misfit-nun-turned-misfit-governess was an insoluble problem. Or rather that this was in any case a misguided way to think about Maria. She was just who she was, in a world – full of Catholics and Nazis as it happened – she did not choose and could not control.
Where greatness is concerned opinion will always be divided. Indeed, my own opinion is already divided against itself. The cohesion and integrity of this work of cinema is extraordinary, and in achieving such a level of craftmanship, it provides answers and solutions to the problems it raises. That may entail killing a sacred cow or two, with its voice-over narrator and its neat psycho-analytic resolution. So be it.
The film nevertheless leaves a dilemma or at least a tension in its wake. On the one hand, it provides a remarkably vivid case-study of mixed-up, complex and always flawed humanity. On the other, it shows us convincingly how some of the most destructive and self-destructive tendencies might be reined in. In other words, a reflection on human frailty lays the groundwork for a eulogy to human will.
As such, the work has great integrity, its resolution considerable power. But what say you, frail Earthling? I am still left with the impression that the filmmaker peered into the abyss and then tactfully withdrew. I wonder, then, where the future work of this promising talent will lead us. Will she take us back to the brink, to a place that’s dark and empty, where a neat resolution is the last thing we’ll find…?