“Hope”, a Norwegian drama by Maria Sødahl, avoids any kind of sentimental or moral blackmail. Forcing the viewer to deal with his fears and his repressed
Forget i tear movie
that too many times have just tried to blackmail the viewer spilling everything possible on them guilt feelings for not being in the position of who was on the screen: they are struggling with a drama without solution (the inevitable condemnation of a incurable disease) and we, the public, pleased with our privilege as distant observers, even ready to judge if anyone committed any false step.
No, Hope (Hope, but also here: why an English title? Ah, eternal waste of Italian provincialism …) the film by Norwegian director Maria Sødahl – born in 1965, whose previous works never arrived in Italy – is something completely different, even if the starting point is that of many melodramas triggered by the discovery of a disease that seems to leave no way out. And it is for the acting quality but also for the delicacy and at the same time the truth of his gaze, for the complexity of the problems raised and above all for the total lack of all kinds of sentimental blackmail the moral.
Just got back from a I work abroad (he is a theater director), Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) decides to be visited for an insistent vision problem and the resonance gives a terrible response: brain metastasis, possibly a consequence of the lung cancer he thought he had defeated the previous year. To complicate matters even more, if it were ever possible, this discovery takes placeAntilles of Christmas, when her father (Einar Økland) also joined her to celebrate together but above all the hospitals work at a reduced pace. And already here, we are starting to deal with a reality that is in charge of multiplying problems instead of solving them.
Anja has been living for thirty years with Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård), producer, it’s not clear whether he is cinema or other types of shows: together they made three children who joined the three of the man’s previous marriage and who are all waiting together for organize the party. With a surprising ability to emotionally keep away from the possible melodramatic slipsthe eye of the video camera records (thanks of course to a screenplay by Sødahl herself, calibrated down to the smallest detail) everything that the woman really has to face, from pains that every now and then attack it insomniafrom the tiredness that suddenly takes her to the discouragement. But also his efforts by her not to let anything leak out to her children (whom she too would like to talk about) and not to spoil the festive air for them. Then using silence to bring out slowly i nodi that Anja and Tomas have more or less voluntarily hidden or repressed and that in the face of such a thing great tragedy suddenly they re-emerge.
Also thanks to an always restrained acting e masterfully realisticthe viewer is brought into a life that he does not know but of which he senses possible junctionsmade of misunderstandings never faced, doubts never resolved, of misunderstandings set aside. “We are happy when we deserve to be” says Anja and the cliché immediately becomes a key to understand more and maybe even look a little within ourselves. While the two have to deal with efficiency but also the bureaucratic coldness of the hospital organization, with fear but at the same time the need to explain what is happening to the children, with cynicism of those who think they can dispense life tips and the humanity of those who try to keep one alive little flame of hope.
Scanned by the passing of days (the film starts on December 23rd and continues until January 2nd, when we see Anja face off an operation of which of course the outcome cannot be known), with more than one twist that we do not want to reveal, Hope takes us by the hand and forces us to do the math with our fears and our repressed, while the disease of the protagonist it becomes a kind of indistinct metaphor of what life can put us in front of. And in the end, no, we won’t forget that easily Hope and his Anja.
May 8, 2022 (change May 9, 2022 | 07:18)
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