Episodic films with several characters have become more common – but few have succeeded with such creativity and variety as Dag Johan Haugerud in his debut feature I Belong. Firstly, his three-episode triptych is effortlessly linked together by the fact that all the protagonists are female residents of the same Oslo apartment block, who meet in the street at the beginning of the film. They are also in the frame story the protagonists of three stories by an author recording the audio version of her short story collection in a studio.
Although the women are all quite different, Haugerud’s film uses them to explore the very same question: why do we behave differently under social pressure than would be the most sensible way, or than we would even want to?
Lise is a nurse who finds herself reluctantly mentoring a new student nurse. Grete, who translates novels from German into Norwegian, has to choose whether to take on a bad debut tome by an author she likes. Ann-Kristin is forced to discuss with her frail pensioner mother about accepting a tantalisingly large sum of money.
With subtle means and precise dialogue, Haugerud takes each “short story” to a point where the viewer comes to realise, along with the protagonist, that not everything is going exactly as it should – but something is preventing the honest, uncompromising words or action. Is this the normal behaviour of the middle-class Western person today?
Timo Malmi