THE FISHING PLACE (Rob Tregenza 2024)

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ELLEN DORRIT PETERSEN AND ANDREAS LUST DIN THE FISHING PLACE

ROB TREGENZA: THE FISHING PLACE: (2025)

About the film, MoMA press release.

An experimental dip into Nazi occupied Norway

This odd, dour piece may alienate you or put you to sleep in its torpid early scenes that show us a semi public gathering, where a grumpy housekeeper appears, as well as a grumpy, unshaven priest, a sullen Nazi officer, and two younger guys who talk about making and selling things. It's a Norwegian town in World War II and it's wintertime. After 35 minutes a bullet kills a man who has been driving a convertible Model T Ford (with the top down!) across the snow, and the priest, riding next to the driver, grabs a pistol and grimly fires some shots at the shooter, and escapes. Here the film comes to life. The film does things to worm its way into your head, and it may succeed, though it is as fragmentary (evidenced especially at the end) as it is intense and passionate. Tregenza clearly is a bit of a cult fulmmaker and one cinephiles need to know about.

The grumpy housekeeper is just released from imprisonment by the Nazis. She is Anna Kristiansen (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), and the Norwegian Nazi Officer Aksel Hansen (Frode Winther) has gotten her released on condition that she do him a difficult favor in return: spy on the priest. He is Adam Honderichn (Andreas Lust), a German High Church Lutheran Minister suspected of resistance activities, and she has only three days to deliver the goods. Minister Honderich is told later by the doctor (Ola Otnes) that he's very ill and has not long to live, and he goes fishing to get fresh air. Though he may be ill, Henderich, as played by Lust, has subtle moments of anger and passion in the scenes that follow.

When he first arrives, the priest, who the Nazi officer says was formerly Catholic nd has changed to Lutheran under suspecious circumstances, comes to inhabit a rather posh and large white frame building, where a girl turns out to be stowed away: she is taken in and cared for by Anna there. In the chruch, blue is the dominant color, both on the walls and in an arresting large painting over the altar. Out on the fishing boat, though the lifht shifts aburuptly, orange dominates. In one arresting scene the camera pans by numerous characters who make a few remarks - one of the tracking shots the director favors, reminiscent of the recurrent weed circle scenes in "That '70s Show." In another out in the snow Anna approaches Nazi officer Hansen and prostates herself in the snow and crawls toward him proferring a folded document which he takes and walks away. In another scene a young man (Jonas Strand Gravli?) is hospitalized with severe internal bleeding from a tree falling on him. He wishes to confess his sins: his exploitation of the land around the town for the hydroelectric power development. The priest is quite creative in his use of scripture. At one point to soothe a suffering woman he recites from the Book of Genesis. The words in Norwegian are impressive.

There is an end to things on a road through a wood, almost a transcendant moment occurs. Then after about an hour and ten minutes, the fourth wall falls and we're thrown into a movie studio complex where many of the actors are assembled, and a slow tracking shot is done. Most of the talk is in English. We can guess the actors don't know they're being photographed. They're being shot from a distance. And then unceremoniously, without drama, The End. So Bergman blends with a bit of Fellini. It's hard to know how to take this, if it's one's first experence of Rob Tregenza, as, for me, it was. As Tregenza has said in an interview, he's working with a very good, in every way professional, cast here. The story, however, feelsa bit underdeveloped. Does Anna find out about the priest? If so, does she inform the Nazi officer?

Nick Newman in THe Film Stage reports that in this film Tregenza used "elaborate crane systems (recalling his debut Talking to Strangers)." The latter was a 1988 film shot in Baltimore, Maryland (on Linkedin the filmmaker lists his current address as Sykesville, Maryland), in a "single continuous take" that depicts a writer (actor Ken Gruz) walking around the city looking for inspiration abd having ten-minute encounters with a sequence of nine individuals. Vincent Canby of the New York Times in a 1991 review called Talking to Strangers "an extended but rather amazing divertissement." He thought some of the segments "painfully arch" and the acting "not great" but saw evidence of "an original and witty intelligence behind the technical elan." Dave Kehr of The Chicago Tribune, and Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader also were favorable. Talking to Strangers has been taken seriously more recently by Richard Brody of The New Yorker writing about a retrospective of Tregenza's films at MoMA in April 2023. Now MoMA is presenting the North American premiere of Tregenza's new film February 6, 2025.

Tregenza has made several other features, though The Fishing Place is his first in eight years. Jean-Luc Godard produced his 1997 Inside/Out, which is set in a mental institution. Roger Ebert reviewed it. He expressed admiration for some of the scenes, but found the film as a whole "arid" and the characters "distanced" and "closed-off." He wrote that viewing the film makes you feel like guests at a party who say they're having a good time when they're really "thinking restlessly of how long we have to stay, and where we can go next."

The director's last feature was Gavagai, released in 2016 - and more reviewed, which is about a German businessman who travels to Norway to translate some poems into Chinese. Avi Offer was very admiring of the film and found it reminiscent of "Tarkovosky's The Sacrifice as well as the films of Carlos Reygadas and Ingmar Bergman." Ben Sachs of The Chicago Reader was similarly admiring, calling the filmmaking "ravishing." Tregenza lists his work as "only shot on 35mm motion picture film stock." MoMA says he "served as cinematographer" - one of them - "for Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)."

The FIshing Place, 94 mins., opened in Norway (limited) Nov. 22, 2024. North American theatrical premiere at MoMA (NY) Feb. 6, 2025, at Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles Mar. 7.