MIFF Session 3: NINJABABY

Rakel is a working on a graphic novel or trying to as her life of casual bumming around can get demanding. Her flatmate notices her changing, her behaviour and body and throws her a pregnancy test. It's positive. As she's not showing to any obvious degree she figures when it might be and who might have co-authored it and he, an easy mooded fitness instructor is the one who takes her for her abortion. The doctor at the clinic frowns and performs an ultrasound that shows a healthy foetus at the end of its second trimester. You know the deal with that, three mesters and yer out. No abortion for Rakel today.

She traces the timeline back six months and realises that the massive root rat (I really did type that then and for the first time ever) from out of town that she flung with once, has to be the father. He's tall, passably sexy and utterly self-centred. Not for him but since she's there, anyway... Back in Oslo her sister, a record producer is heading off to LA on a career making job and can't take the bairn once born even though she and her partner have been losing the race against father time to father children. Fitness instructor steps in to offer a relationship, come what may. It's like choosing a banking solution on the phone. Meanwhile a cartoon version of the foetus is appearing on surfaces wherever she looks, wisecracking and sowing guilt intentionally or not.

Early on in this film I wondered what it would be like if it were Australian film. This own-voice syndrome test can render films trading on local charm try hard in a few lines. Use it on things like The Obvious Child and you get cinge instead of cute. See also anything by Wes Anderson. That applied to this until the more serious aspects of the situation emerged and the quirky mood stretched so tightly around the story that it became transparent, a thin protective layer rather than a way of working. Rakel begins to ask very serious questions of herself as the world that has gathered around her begins to adapt and cope much better than she does at its centre. The story has set this up so well that it feels like it hasn't changed at all.

A lot of that is due to the commitment of Kristina Kujath Thorp to what might easily have become a frustrating and alienating character. Her caprices and quirks feel natural and can frequently create winces in the viewer but without the balance she discovers in her performance it might have been too hard to follow her. Doubly so when you consider that the pleasantness of the people around her is never beige but credibly ... nice. Nader Khademi brings a quiet gravitas to Mos, the fitness instructor, rounding out his patience with Rakel with some quirks of his own. Are some of his decisions that believable, though? I think they might be but I just didn't want it so. Even Arthur Berning's "Dick Jesus" is played against his character's over confidence and provides a surprise or two in the final act.

So, I'll reccomend this one for its gift at the end. It takes a while to unwrap it but its poignancy is sobering and valuable. For a film that only needed to be lightly quirky to find its gravity AND keep all that quirk intact AND never to rely on cuteness, it kicks more goals than it started with.