Sonate pour Roos

"Disappearance" is elegantly simple but intense, and fortunately for a review without spoilers, the film's emotional content is its most significant. This is a film about family, and the need to share one's love and one's fears with the people that matter the most. Sharing isn't easy for Roos (Rifka Lodeizen), because it means loading her burden onto a mother who resents the choices they each made earlier in life, and onto a half-brother so young he doesn't deserve to bear the load. Life isn't fair that way. Finding the courage to begin the necessary conversations, knowing the pain they will cause, doesn't come easily to Roos. When she does open up, we might be tempted to criticize her timing, but under the circumstances I wager few of us would do better.

At times symbolism supplants narration, usually to good effect. A scene with a fish reveals how completely Roos has turned her thoughts to the well-being of others. The moose incident may remind Roos that she still has some choices to make, or alternatively, it may merely create what she feels is the right setting for a conversation with her mother.

What really matters, we are shown, is sharing our love of life's beauty with others, and letting their love into our life as well. Roos builds that sharing bond with her brother in the ethereal beauty of an ice cave and with a pragmatic and odd conversation in a sauna that should remind him of the importance of human interaction. Rebuilding the bond with her mother is more challenging; only when their relationship is stripped to its core does the elder woman allow her daughter back into her heart. Then Roos is finally able to control her own destiny.

"Disappearance" isn't easy to watch, but it is so very worthwhile.

"Disappearance" has close links to two other films. In the first place to "Beyond sleep" (2016), the previous film of director Boudewijn Koole which also plays in Northern Norway. In the second place to "Autumn sonata" (1978, Ingmar Bergman) with respect to the troubled mother - daughter relationship (although in "Disappearance" the daughter visits the mother in stead of the other way round).

The mother - daughter relationship seems to be the main theme of the film. Their last meeting evidently did not go well. We learn that the daughter left without saying goodbye and when the mother apologizes and proposes to forgive and forget everything the daughter hesitates. We do not learn however what exactly went wrong.

So the tension between mother and daughter is tangible from the beginning. See for example the scene in which the mother plays piano during a neighborhood party and the daughter demonstratively (and noisely) opens a can of beer. The mother has been concert pianist from a very young age. Again a similarity with "Autumn sonata". The film seems to suggest that the fact that the mother never knew parental love herself influenced her relationship with her daughter. These suggestion is in my opinion a little too explicit. One of the few negatives of this film.

All in all the tension is not making matters easy for the daughter, who has an important message but can't find the right time to tell it. "Disappearance" evolves in a film were sometimes the things not said are of utmost importance.

An additional theme of the film, much more surprising to me, was the relationship between Roos (the daughter) and her much younger half brother Bengt. Despite the fact that he is only a half brother and much younger, this relationship is extremely close. One of the most touching (and delicate, because it could easily become effect driven) scenes in the movie is the one in which Roos gives sexual education to Bengt in the sauna.

The movie is shot in the area around Tromso, and the landscapes are very beautiful. Nature plays a prominent part in the brilliant final scene, from which the film derives its title. This scene places the film at par with "The balad of Narayama" (1958, Keisuke Kinoshita & 1983, Shohei Imamura).