Aficionados of long, contemplative single takes will appreciate The Fishing Place, a singular World War II drama set in Nazi-occupied Norway, written and directed by American indie stalwart Rob Tregenza. Primarily using a modest crane to guide his camera, Tregenza explores the tense dynamics in a fishing village via sustained vignettes, focusing on the interactions among a Nazi officer (Frode Winther), a housekeeper (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), and the German minister (Andreas Lust) whom she is forced to spy on. Some of these sequences have an eerie, ethereal atmosphere—especially a fishing trip involving the officer and the minister, in which the image of the men against the idyllic landscape gives way to a bloody orange silhouette—but many scenes, especially those set indoors, have the hermetic airlessness of an experimental theater production. Aside from his own directorial efforts (Gavagai, Talking to Strangers), Tregenza also served as cinematographer on Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, a masterful meditation on a traveling circus that consists of 39 extended single takes. Tarr evoked an entire, tangible world (cosmos, really), which Tregenza never quite manages. The Fishing Place registers more as a calculated, intellectual exercise—particularly in the bold decision to break the fourth wall with 30 minutes left in the film and remain there, again via a single take.
(4/11/2025)
