\n\tDanish teenager Lea (played with remarkable maturity by Marie Helweg Augustsen) learns a lot more at a summer fat camp than just how to eat balanced meals and exercise right in Weightless, an audacious but sensitive feature debut from director Emilie Thalund. <\/p>\n
\n\tSome viewers will immediately spot the plot\u2019s bare-bones similarity to Ulrich Seidl\u2019s 2013 work Paradise: Hope, not to mention Catherine Breillat\u2019s Fat Girl and many another explorations of teens with low self-esteem discovering sexual desire in themselves and others. However, Thalund and screenwriter Marianne Lentz imbue the set-up with a fresh 2025 perspective while attuning the material to a very particular Danish frequency in a society perpetually triangulating between child-centric educational approaches, permissiveness and conformity. The film took home the top prize for the New Directors\u2019 strand at this year\u2019s San Sebastian Film Festival.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tWeightless\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tFreshens up well-worn formulas.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: San Sebastian Film Festival
Cast: Marie Helweg Augustsen, Ella Paaske, Joachim Fjelstrup, Jessica Dinnage, Max Vorreiter Jensen, Zere Celik
Director: Emilie Thalund
Screenwriter: Marianne Lentz, based on an idea by Emilie Thalund
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 36 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tAs the story opens, we see Lea arriving at the summer camp with her mother (Julie Thalund) and little brother (Joel Hesse Johansen). She gets a full physical and the all-important weigh-in to set a benchmark against which to measure her weight going forward. Her mom, a woman of plus-size proportions herself, is keen to emphasize that coming to this camp was Lea\u2019s own idea, and that Lea herself wants to lose weight to get healthier.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s interesting that at no point does anyone mention the possibility of Lea taking a weight-loss drug like Ozempic or Wegovy, medication invented by local company Novo Nordisk and which at the moment are the biggest things to come out of Denmark since LEGO or Hans Christian Andersen. (And yes, these drugs apparently can be prescribed for teenagers in Denmark and the EU.) Presumably, this camp is committed to helping kids lose weight the old-school way, with tightly portion-controlled meals (candy and cookies are strictly prohibited) and plenty of exercise. <\/p>\n
\n\tLea is assigned to share a room with Sasha (Ella Paaske), a young woman her age who doesn\u2019t seem to have a weight problem but has been parked at the camp because she\u2019s been in too much trouble lately. Per Sasha, she\u2019s a \u201cbad influence\u201d on others according to her school, and her parents seem at their wit\u2019s end with her, especially after her fling with a much older man.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen fully adult camp counsellor Rune (Joachim Fjelstrup) starts taking a special interest in both Sasha and Lea\u2019s welfare, dropping in at their room to chat to them, it\u2019s clear he\u2019s walking on much thinner ice. Moreover, Lea soon develops romantic feelings for him, revealed by the way she giggles uncontrollably at every goofy thing he says and even spying on him having a shower when the curtain of his own room is left (accidentally? on purpose?) ajar.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn one of several clever bits of scripted wrongfooting of the viewer, we\u2019re led to worry that poor Lea is going to get her heart broken when Rune pursues more conventionally attractive Sasha. In fact, it is Lea he\u2019s interested in, as shown in a very icky scene where he makes his move, the sort of thing most American-made movies probably wouldn\u2019t even show. But Thalund and the cast play the material, choreographed with an intimacy coordinator, with just the right amount of finesse so that it\u2019s neither eroticized nor editorialized. Instead, the scene\u2019s focus is on Augustsen\u2019s expressions, which run the full gamut of surprise, alarm, confusion, and just a hint of excitement as it\u2019s clear she thinks that this will be the start of an affair just like Sasha had.<\/p>\n
\n\tMeanwhile, Thalund and Lentz explore the complexity of female friendships through the ever-shifting dynamic between Lea and Sasha, a power struggle\/fight for survival\/Platonic courtship dance far more complicated than anything going on between Lea and Rune. Clearly a bit of a minx and well-used to being the top girl in most social situations, Sasha uses Lea for her own purposes at times, especially when they sneak off to go drinking in the woods with some local teenage boys one night who cruelly tease Lea. Much to Sasha\u2019s chagrin, Lea stands up for herself when she\u2019s finally had enough, and the dynamic shifts again between them from bully-and-victim to something much more like friends over the course of the narrative.<\/p>\n
\n\tUltimately, viewers may find themselves divided over the low-key way the film wraps it all up, opting for an ending that\u2019s both entirely credible but also a damp squelch in dramatic terms. Moreover, reactions may vary depending on whether a viewer was ever a teenage girl, overweight or sexually abused \u2014 or perhaps all of the above. Certainly, the film doesn\u2019t deliver any rousing sense of justice like in, say, director Jennifer Fox\u2019s child-abuse-story The Tale<\/a>. But then this is a different sort of story in a very different set of hands, told with empathy but also a certain clinical, detached inscrutability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Danish teenager Lea (played with remarkable maturity by Marie Helweg Augustsen) learns a lot more at a summer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337,90933,90934],"class_list":["post-179122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-san-sebastian-international-film-festival","tag-ssiff2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}