“The Fishing Place” is a visually arresting exploration of resistance, including that of its writer-director, Rob Tregenza. Set in a German-occupied Norwegian village in World War II, it tracks several characters circling one another in a world that’s striking for its natural beauty and its humming menace. Outwardly, everything and everyone here looks so ordinary, including the prosperous resident who, early on at a get-together at his home, salutes his guest of honor. “Our friendship goes way back,” he says, “we have been on the same team.” He then raises his glass, inviting the room to do the same, and toasts his guest, a Nazi officer.
Beautifully shot in film by Tregenza and divided into two discrete sections, the movie opens on a fjord in the southern Norwegian county of Telemark. It’s winter. Snow has heavily blanketed the ground and dusted the surrounding forest and jagged peaks, lending the village a picture-postcard quality. Although Tregenza doesn’t offer much by way of historical background, it seems worth noting that Telemark is the birthplace of Vidkun Quisling, the head of the Norwegian government under occupation whose name became a synonym for traitor. It’s also the setting for Anthony Mann’s 1965 war film “The Heroes of Telemark,” in which Kirk Douglas plays a Norwegian physicist turned heroic resistance fighter.
The mild intrigue in “The Fishing Place” is almost incidental to the overall movie and centers on Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a middle-age woman who arrives in the village with a single suitcase and no explanation. Sometime later, she is approached by the Nazi officer, Hansen (Frode Winther), a Norwegian with whom she has a murky history. “May I have this dance,” he says with a threatening undertone just before reminding her that she once turned him down. He seems to be holding a grudge; he also holds the power. So, when he orders Anna to begin working as a housekeeper for a newly arrived priest, Honderich (the quietly charismatic Andreas Lust), and reporting on his activities, she gets to work.
Much of what transpires involves Anna, Hansen and Honderich, a German Lutheran. As life goes on, the priest tends to the oddly unwelcoming community — several residents warn him about the town — as Anna and the officer keep watch. Along the way, Tregenza seems to directly nod at the Mann movie, including in a scene set inside the priest’s church. More generally, Tregenza’s film offers up a counterpoint to the fantasies (and national myths) that turn history into screen entertainment, people into glamorous heroes. Tregenza is adept at deploying the conventions of mainstream fiction — guns are fired here, blows struck and brows furrowed — but he’s more interested in dismantling norms than in just recycling them.
In that respect, the most intriguing figure in “The Fishing Place” is, in a manner of speaking, Tregenza, who throughout the film continuously draws attention to his camerawork, as he plays with the palette and different registers of realism, mixing in naturalistic scenes with more stylized ones that border on the hieroglyphic. His touch is evident right from the beginning with an eerie image of what looks like a ghost fishing boat adrift on the water amid tendrils of sea fog. Soon, Anna has arrived and with the camera parked behind her, glides toward the town. She looks like she’s floating on air, as if she too were a specter.
As the thinly plotted story develops, Tregenza suggests there are commonalities between the priest and the Nazi, who in one otherworldly sequence are seen fishing side by side. Drained of ordinary color, the image is vividly washed in bilious green — as if this world itself was nauseated — and then briefly turns a hellish-looking orange-red. As the two men stand talking with their fishing rods in hand (“Nothing’s biting today?”), the camera circles the boat, movement that effectively draws a firm line around them. One character might prove more sympathetic than the other, but these two men, Tregenza implies, are also connected.
Tregenza reveals at least some of the mystery surrounding Anna’s arrival in the second, strikingly different section of “The Fishing Place.” In this much-shorter part — as the players keep milling about, and Tregenza’s camera continues its often heady, near-hypnotic prowling and pirouetting — the filmmaker abruptly peels away the story’s fiction in a lengthy self-reflexive interlude. As a bid to draw attention to the movie’s artificiality, this quasi-Brechtian move proves, at least for this viewer, less visually and intellectually satisfying than everything that came before. That said, Tregenza is the kind of authentic independent who’s always worth seeking out; when he is behind the camera, he holds you rapt from the get-go.
The Fishing Place
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.
