An Affair – An Affair (2018)

Directed by: Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken | 88 minutes | drama, thriller | Actors: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tarjei Sandvik Moe, Anneke von der Lippe, Carsten Bjørnlund, Agnes Kittelsen, Ingjerd Egeberg, Mattis Herman Nyquist, Helga Guren, Isabel Beth Toming, Anders T. Andersen, Mads Ousdal, Tone Beate Mostraum

We know the city of Hamar in the Netherlands mainly from the Vikingskipet, the beautiful ice rink where home rider Johann Olav Koss gave the Dutch long track skaters no chance for the gold during the 1992 Winter Olympics, and where many important skating competitions have been held since then. It is less known that Hamar is also home to one of Norway’s greatest film talents. Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken (born 1989) has developed in recent years into a promising filmmaker, an autodidact who writes, produces and directs. With his short films he was highly regarded at various film festivals around the world and his first full-length feature ‘Returning Home’ (‘Å vende tilbake’, 2015) made it straight to the shortlist for the Norwegian Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film. With ‘An Affair’ (‘En affære, 2018) he tackles a subject that we were confronted with not so long ago in another Scandinavian film: an older, bound woman who enters into a sexual relationship with a teenager. True ‘Queen of Hearts’ (2019), because we are talking about that Danish film by director May el-Toukhy, which involved us in the psychological cat-and-mouse game between two complex protagonists, ‘An Affair’ is much more straightforward and the motives of main character Anita (played by Andrea Bræin Hovig) unfortunately remain unclear.

Anita in her 40s lives with her husband Hasse (Carsten Bjørnlund), a successful lawyer with whom she has been married for five years. When we get to know her, she’s just starting her new job as a sports teacher at the local high school. During the proposal round, her attention is already drawn to the mysterious boy Markus (Tarjei Sandvik Moe), who brags about the size of his genitals during the proposal round. Once at home, Anita has the feeling that she is being chased during her daily run. Not much later, flowers are suddenly delivered to the door and she receives spicy messages. When Markus suddenly crawls into her car after school, the two can hardly keep their hands off each other. Anita does not hesitate for a moment; he wants it, but she absolutely does too. After their lovemaking, she giggles like a teenage girl – as long as she doesn’t fall in love with a sixteen-year-old… But it’s too late. Markus has seen it after a few times, but Anita – whose husband is abroad a lot and then likes to be surrounded by beautiful, young lawyers – wants more and starts stalking her student. For example, she shows up at the reading club of Markus’ mother Unni (Anneke von der Lippe), an old gymnastic friend of hers. When Markus confesses to having fallen in love with a girl his own age, Anita decides to try to win him back through all kinds of manipulative actions.

Is she insecure because of her aging body? Is she frustrated because her marriage is so loveless? Or is she still a fifteen-year-old teenager deep down who never grew up? The reason for Anita’s obsession with the young Markus remains a mystery. In the first half, Dahlsbakken gets away with it, because the focus is mainly on the fact that the boy tries to seduce her. Once she gives in – while we all know that as an adult she should be sensible enough to hold off on the boat – ‘An Affair’ loses power. Of course there’s still some tension here and there, whether she’s caught trying to stalk Markus or not, for example, but you mainly wonder what the hell is going on with her that she’s risking everything for a crush who is doomed to failure in advance. The intention is probably that we should empathize with her, that we share her frustrations and hope that she succeeds in winning Markus back. But partly due to the lack of background and depth, it is difficult to fathom or even find Anita sympathetic, no matter how solid Hovig’s acting performances are. Actually, this film has few characters at all who are really nice, for whom you can develop warm feelings. This makes the film feel unnecessarily cold. How different it was with the thematically comparable ‘Queen of Hearts’ already mentioned, where the main character also goes very far (much further even) to get her very young lover under her control: that earned her our amazement, incomprehension, disapproval and even disgust. It did something to you and the film stays smoldering for a long time to come. While we put the events in ‘An Affair’ aside, without ever looking back