THE STORY – At the height of her music career, Maja falls apart and has to step away from her ambitions. Depressed and broke, she moves back home with her mother and works part-time at a local high school. Far from the spotlight, wrapped in everyday kindness, she slowly finds her way back to life.
THE CAST – Marie Ulven, Anders Danielsen Lie, Tone Mostraum, Embla Berntsen, Snorre Kind Monsson & Clara Dessau
THE TEAM – Eivind Landsvik (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes
The queer-coded popstar-to-independent-film-actor pipeline is a recent media phenomenon that seriously needs to be studied. While the idea of a pop star cameo in a mainstream release isn’t a new concept in Hollywood, the recent interest in icons and their collaborations with independent filmmakers outside of the mainstream is a fascinating career detour from what we’d usually expect from the vain zeitgeist. Charli XCX, the renowned British artist who ruled the charts with her era-changing album “Brat,” most recently veered toward the cinematic form. With her eclectic taste in cinema, the list of established auteurs in her roster of future theatrical releases includes Gregg Araki (“I Want Your Sex”), Takashi Miike, and Romain Gavras (“Sacrifice”). While the box office numbers are regrettably slumping with each new XCX appearance on the silver screen, her unabashed cinephilia is a refreshing change of pace for an artist working in a highly saturated industry.
Norway is no exception to this familiar phenomenon. In the case of Marie Ulven, or better known by her stage name “girl in red,” her impressive career began in her bedroom. She would upload tracks onto Soundcloud as her primary platform for self-expression. With her newfound moniker, she captured the attention of the Soundcloud community with her iconic track “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend.” Attuned to the experiences and heartbreak of her lesbian demographic, Ulven’s humble origins mirror those of her fictional counterpart in the Norwegian coming-of-age dramedy “Low Expectations.” In a less sardonic vein than XCX’s exhausting self-reflexive endeavor, “The Moment,” “Low Expectations” succeeds in its mimicry of reality, where newcomer director Eivind Landsvik reflects on Ulven’s experiences in the industry to produce a moving story of self-actualization.
Portraying the alcoholic misadventures of Maja, a Norwegian musician on the verge of a midlife crisis, the allusions from Ulven’s career propose an imaginary scenario where her music career abruptly backfires. In the process, “Low Expectations” successfully spotlights the unseen challenges of maintaining autonomy in an image-addicted industry. Landsvik isn’t afraid of including scenes of his protagonist at her very worst. The film boldly opens with the unlikely heroine vomiting and deliriously muttering beside a filthy toilet. As a byproduct of her hefty substance abuse, she retreats to her family home with empty pockets. Taking advantage of her mother’s nepotism, Maja is hired at a local school as an unenthusiastic substitute.
The film’s compassion and optimism balance Landsvik’s uncomfortable scenes of substance withdrawal. “Low Expectations” is most original when it curiously sidetracks to follow the naive perspective of Aida, a teenage dancer from Maja’s class. Through the parallel storylines, Landsvik cleverly examines Maja’s public image through an adolescent periphery. By intersplicing the quotidian realities of her niche fanbase, “Low Expectations” questions what it means to be a celebrity in the social media age. The film interrogates the lengths to which personal sacrifice leads susceptible artists down a spiral of uncontrollable vices. Landsvik includes patient scenes in which his ditzy protagonist gracefully performs a melody on the piano, slowly rehabilitating herself to her day-to-day routine through her craft. In the process, Aida’s experiences are interspersed with Maja’s troubled cycle, aptly balancing an optimistic and a nihilistic perspective on a healthy student-teacher relationship.
Ulven’s naturalistic performance is what sells the authenticity backing “Low Expectations.” Working with what she evidently already knows from her experience touring as “girl in red,” Ulven offers a tender performance that explores the pressures of maintaining a public image in an industry that craves rampant attention. While Ulven’s subtle performance commands the screen, Landsvik’s familiar direction is less promising. The artistic imprint left from his debut borrows heavily from the Oslo Pictures wheelhouse. The film’s color grade looks aesthetically similar to Joachim Trier’s recent entries “Sentimental Value” and “The Worst Person in the World,” incorporating a lush pastel palette to create a pleasantly pensive atmosphere. The film’s editorial form is also reminiscent of Kristoffer Borgli’s acerbic use of quick cutting and fast-paced B-roll, which serves as dramatic punctuation for alternate perspectives. In both cases, the implementation of the techniques is less effective within the context of Landsvik’s narrative.
While Landsvik is still configuring his artistic voice, “Low Expectations” warmly confronts Maja’s inner demons with rewarding doses of earned empathy. Ultimately, the film understands that the beauty of artistic expression begins at a young age, incorporating Aida’s passion for dance as a narrative tool to contrast the protagonist’s internal reckoning. Without sugarcoating the film’s didactic final scene, its conclusion maturely wraps the film’s quaint saga of self-acceptance with haphazard exposition. While the film’s ending obnoxiously ties up loose ends to satisfy audiences who crave clear conclusions, Landsvik’s penultimate scene is arguably more impressive and expressionistic as a narrative wrap-up. Through a toe-tapping montage, “Low Expectations” intercuts Aida’s expressive dance routine with Maja’s return to the studio, revealing beauty and solace in their artistic practices. The hypnotic mirage of kinetic movement is accompanied by an irresistible fusion of piano, strings, and electronic beats that perfectly wraps the narrative, until Landsvik inevitably feels the need to include a makeshift epilogue to conclude his formidable story.
