“The Fishing Place” Puts History Into the Present Tense

The best filmmakers, looking to the past, see the future. The Holocaust and the Nazi menace to Europe have been filmmakers’ mainstays for decades, and sometimes the effort (whether more or less artistically accomplished) to depict the historical horrors of the extreme right has also served as an X-ray revealing hidden authoritarian or nationalistic infections in ostensibly democratic politics. An extraordinary new film, “The Fishing Place,” by the veteran American independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza, confronts the Nazi onslaught during the Second World War by means of a daring aesthetic and a refined narrative sensibility that are utterly distinctive—and with a bold twist that overtly wrenches the subject into the present tense.

Tregenza has been making films for nearly forty years. His first feature, “Talking to Strangers,” premièred in 1988, but “The Fishing Place,” which opens Feb. 6, at MOMA, is only his fifth. Tregenza always does his own cinematography, and his style is entirely his own, involving extended and elaborate camera moves on dollies, cranes, cars, or even boats. (He uses a crane as freely as an artist wields a paintbrush.) Like his previous film, “Gavagai,” from 2016, “The Fishing Place” is filmed and set in Norway, but whereas the former took place in the present day, the new one is a historical drama, set in a remote village in Telemark, amid the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany. It’s centered on a woman named Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), who arrives in town and serves as a housekeeper for a businessman named Klaus (Eindride Eidsvold). Her presence is no accident: previously arrested by the Nazis, she has been released under the supervision of a local Norwegian S.S. officer, Hansen (Frode Winther), who then orders her to keep house for—and to spy on—a recently arrived priest (Andreas Lust), a German émigré whose politics Hansen finds suspicious.

From the start, Tregenza’s serenely spectacular methods are deployed not merely to depict the action but to become a part of it. The images in which Anna, Hansen, and the priest approach the village, separately but similarly, make them appear to be gliding above the ground rather than walking on it, as if ultimately superfluous to the place. It’s not fanciful to see a philosophical hint in such details: Tregenza’s film consistently succeeds in thinking in images, offering not just a depiction of events but a vision of the world by way of style and tone. Even the film’s basic exposition, showing Anna working in Klaus’s household and receiving her fateful instructions from Hansen, is richly suggestive of the turmoil vibrating beneath the orderly domestic surface. It unfolds in an unbroken six-minute take that ranges through the dining room and an art-filled salon, introducing the characters and suggesting their conflicts: Klaus’s differences with his bookish son (Peder Herlofsen); the hostility of Klaus’s wife, Margit (Gjertrud Jynge), to his Nazi sympathies; Anna’s silent resentment at serving under Hansen’s command.

The performances have a modestly theatrical formality that, in avoiding showiness, conveys the high pressure of life under constant surveillance. The dialogue is mostly terse; each sentence bears the weight of life-and-death implications. Only Nazis, free to preen, enjoy the ease of prolixity. At one point, a local man who’s a member of the resistance (no spoilers) manages to hint to Anna that he knows both that she’s an ally and that she is under pressure to collaborate. When the occupiers are closing in on the man, Tregenza films a resulting act of violence with a furious restraint that highlights the moral agony of an exalted but dangerous commitment—of the tragedy of contradictory vows.

Tregenza’s agile camera connects characters to one another, linking actions in suspenseful chains of causality, and rooting the drama in a sense of locale, both in intimate domestic settings and in mighty, numinous landscapes. He creates images of a sculptural sinuosity, conjuring intricate depths of space and time. The crux of the drama is a single shot, lasting a full seven minutes, that begins at eye level with a modest outing for Anna and the priest, involves the presence of a child in hiding, spirals high to reveal Anna’s decisive response to Hansen’s demands, and follows her to a desperate escape. Comings and goings are meticulously parsed, in such a way that actions seen on camera often reverberate with enormous off-camera implications. The movie’s terrifying dénouement emerges in another seven-minute shot, in which hints and premonitions are transformed into passions and horrors and in which landscape—and, as per the title, a seascape—appear not simply as backdrops but as dramatic and intellectual engines of the story.

Telemark—does that ring a bell? As in Anthony Mann’s 1965 action film, “The Heroes of Telemark,” starring Kirk Douglas? It’s where Norway had a hydroelectric plant that produced heavy water, which Germany planned to use in the effort to develop nuclear weapons. As a result, the plant was successfully sabotaged during the war by the Norwegian resistance with help from the British forces. In “The Fishing Place,” the incongruous presence of the industrialist Klaus in such a rural backwater appears instantly significant. So does that of an excitable young engineer (Jonas Strand Gravli) who pesters him with seemingly fanciful technological dreams. Later, in a moment of extreme crisis, the engineer lets slip the term “heavy water” and also speaks regretfully about the likely impact of his industrial-development work: “What do you think this place will look like in fifty years, no matter who wins?”

Tregenza here hints at another level of conflict that will eventually become apparent. Though the movie, needless to say, is clear-eyed about the evils of the Nazi occupation and the danger of tyrannical fascism overwhelming democratic routine, it also points ahead toward the implications of Allied victory and the economic and social changes that will result from liberal-minded scientific progress in the nuclear age. There’s an existential premise at work regarding the socially destructive power of technology, and Tregenza, having dropped hints along the way, eventually reveals it with an artistic shock of enormous daring. The movie concludes with a twenty-two-minute take that’s too giddy a jolt to spoil. Suffice it to say that this spectacularly conceived and choreographed shot has the effect of scrutinizing Tregenza’s effort to make a movie in present-day Norway about Nazi-occupied Telemark, and, thereby, of raising a wide range of questions that stem from the project.

Why make a movie today about the Nazi occupation? (Are there countries not far from Norway that are currently threatened by occupying forces? Is ideological scrutiny by governmental authorities an increasing menace? What kinds of official orders pose moral dilemmas?) And why might Tregenza highlight continuities between a murderous authoritarian regime and modern democracies? (Wasn’t it a modern democracy that brought Hitler to power? Do even liberal regimes get complacent and find themselves complicit with workaday forms of malevolent power? Did defeating the Nazis spur the Allies to a golden age of justice or rid the world of fascism? Or does fascism once again pose a threat to liberal democracy?) Are the dangers of ostensibly nonpartisan technology really so great? (Do you really have to ask?)

Tregenza shot “The Fishing Place” in wide-screen images, more than twice as wide as they are high, filling the frame with space, air, light, earth, mountains, sea, sky, and forest. His camera’s graceful gyrations render all the more explicit the inextricable bond of dramas and their landscapes, embodying the film’s ideal of a physical and aesthetic connection with nature—its preoccupations with the spiritual dimensions of landscape and climate, color and texture. In moments of crisis, the images embrace the natural settings. In a climactic sequence unfolding in woodland, the camera ascends to offer the stark sight of the trees, arrestingly straight and tall. They figure as witnesses (and, with their creaking and rustling in the wind, not even mute ones) to the physical and moral agonies of history—perhaps, as victims, too.

Working on a relatively low budget, in isolation from Hollywood, Tregenza displays a virtuosity that is fully integrated into his comprehensive cinematic vision, his finely imagined re-creation of history, and his long-gestating complex of ideas. Not only is he an artist; he’s an artisan of the highest order, whose sense of craft and skill are finer, deeper, and more adventurous than most of the competition in Hollywood—or, for that matter, anywhere. Very few of the year’s officially acclaimed and critically lauded cinematographers can match him in audacity and in achievement; none of the five Oscar-nominated directors unites a world view and an aesthetic as staunchly or deeply. There’s no point in asserting that a given movie deserves popularity or even a shot at achieving it: commercial success is a happy accident that certainly advances a filmmaker’s career, but the effort to achieve commercial success often spoils that career in advance. The release of “The Fishing Place” at MOMA is unlikely to launch this movie into multiplexes, but it does something far more significant and far more in synch with the filmmaker’s world view: it launches the movie forward into history. ♦