Norway famously gave us Liv Ullmann, muse to the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, but since then, thi
Norway famously gave us Liv Ullmann, muse to the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, but since then, this country of just 5.55 million people continues to punch above its weight, adding a long line of actresses of a similar caliber. To that list that includes Ane Dahl Torp, Helga Guren, Renate Reinsve and many more we must now add Pia Tjelta, whose performance in Nina Knag’s feature-debut — a hard-hitting psychological drama posing as Sirkian love story — is next-level stuff. As the saying goes, her performance turns on a dime, sending what first appears to a pretty standard, well-meaning story about the global refugee crisis somewhere much more personal and much, much darker.
A striking brunette who would fit very well into Pedro Almodóvar’s repertory company, Tjelta plays Eva, a small-town teacher who has become involved with a local campaign to welcome the steady influx of Syrian immigrants. Her husband Jostein (Kristoffer Joner) is the local mayor and seems to be dragging his feet on the issue, for fear of offending right-wing voters as his term comes up for re-election. But Eva is all in, and hosts a language class where she teaches Norwegian and encourages imaginative writing.
Into this class comes Amir (Tarek Zayat), a shy 18-year-old who impresses Eva with his emotional intelligence by writing a strikingly poetic account of his time in limbo as he applies for citizenship. Eva encourages him to write, and gets ahead of herself in mapping out Emir’s vivid future as a writer and scholar. This plan almost falls at the first hurdle, since Emir is earmarked to be moved on to another refugee hostel in the far north. Eva, however, sees a chance to save him, and, while Jostein is away on business, she moves the adolescent man into their home.
Given the images being used in the publicity campaign, it’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that the couple embark on a May-December romance, much like the recent Todd Haynes movie of the same name. But what is surprising is how, just as Haynes did, Knag uses the premise for a bait-and-switch. For a time, Eva seems like a lonely older woman whose husband has been cheating on her. She spends her spare time at the swimming pool, which underscores the sense that she is floating through life, and the eyes she makes at Emir are, for a time, quite (sadly) relatable, a need for attention. (Indeed, her affection for Knut Hamsun’s romantic 1898 novel Victoria is a hell of a misdirect.)
But just as you start to think, well, that’s all very well, but what is she thinking? — this married professional woman whose adult daughter has only recently left home — Knag takes a step back, revealing Eva as a lot more complicated than the community-minded homebody we first mistake her for. For one thing, she is a very jealous woman, a factor that comes into play when she discovers that Emir has been lying to her. At first, she accepts his explanation, but by the end of the film this very sensitive piece of information has become Chekhov’s gun, and it’s only a matter of time before someone pulls the trigger. But who?
This might make Don’t Call Me Mama sound like a thriller, but Tjelta adds so many more layers to the character it’s actually something more disturbing, like watching a midlife crisis in excruciating real time. Though the title does make sense — thanks to a disturbing scene in the last stretch — it doesn’t quite explain the depths of what’s being addressed here, a provocative comment on the things the political classes will do to save themselves whenever the chips are down.
Title: Don’t Call Me Mama
Festival: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
Director: Nina Knag
Screenwriters: Nina Knag, Kathrine Valen Zeiner
Cast: Pia Tjelta, Kristoffer Joner, Tarek Zayat
Sales agent: REinvent Studios
Running time: 1 hr 48 mins
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