“It is thanks to Marie Helweg Augustsen’s deep understanding of her character’s claustrophobic reality that the film’s most powerful moments come to life.”

“And I know none of this will matter in the long run
But I know a sound is still a sound around no one…”
— Fiona Apple, ‘I Want You to Love Me’

Much like other forms of writing, whether it be literary, musical, or academic, in many ways writing about movies ultimately becomes a way of writing about ourselves. Even in the pursuit of objectivity or impersonality, something of us always leaks through: why a particular theme, setting, character, or moment affects us the way it does. So, I felt compelled to write about Emilie Thalund’s Weightless and its central character Lea (Marie Helweg Augustsen), a fifteen-year-old overweight girl, in a personal way. Because, like Lea, I have always had a body that didn’t quite look as ‘fit’ as it should, as ‘beautiful’ as others, or as I myself would have wished. And yet, like my thinner and more conventionally attractive peers, my body has always been full of longing and desire. This, I believe, is the central conflict of Weightless: a body deemed undesirable is still a body full of desire.

Thus, we follow Lea as she struggles with her weight, dropped off by her mother at a place that’s part summer camp, part health retreat. There she befriends Sasha (Ella Paaske), a thin, beautiful, and carefree girl, and spends her days caught between two impulses: trying to look like her new friends by eating less and exercising more, and trying to get the attention of Rune (Joachim Fjelstrup), the charming camp instructor who is kind to her. Lea and the other teenagers are constantly talking about sex, and her new friend and the boys are always trying to escape – from their parents, school, and familiar social circles – to pursue it. Driven by hormones, they act impulsively. Though youth is often said to be wasted on the young, these teenagers still hold a sense of wonder toward the world that adults have long lost. However, while her friends discuss and sometimes engage in sexual activity, Lea never attracts the boys’ attention. That attention goes to Sasha, who has the perfect body and excels at every activity the camp instructors assign. Lea, by contrast, is at the camp just to lose weight, and she is constantly reminded of this.

Narratively, Emilie Thalund’s Weightless is a coming-of-age and sexual awakening film that, at times, plays things too safe and struggles to set itself apart from others in the genre. Some of the film’s weaknesses stem from its reluctance to break free from genre conventions, leaving certain narrative threads underdeveloped. Take, for instance, the relationship between Lea and Rune. Ignored by boys her own age, Lea turns her attention to an older man who shows her kindness and seems to perceive her body differently. This dynamic is packed with narrative potential, yet it is largely diluted, perhaps because fully exploring it would challenge the kind of film Weightless is trying to be. The abusive nature of their relationship becomes disturbingly clear in a scene where Rune masturbates near Lea. He is not only an adult, but one of the adults in charge of the camp, making the power imbalance impossible to ignore. The film brushes past this, missing an opportunity to fully explore Lea’s search for validation, the asymmetry of desire between the youth and the adult, and the vulnerability of being seen for the first time.

It is, however, largely thanks to Marie Helweg Augustsen’s deep understanding of her character’s claustrophobic reality that the film’s most powerful moments come to life. Whenever she appears on screen, the film noticeably improves. Look at how Thalund frequently frames her character in tight close-ups, sometimes uncomfortably so, almost as if to symbolize her being too big for her surroundings, yet Augustsen’s nuanced performance conveys this suffocating atmosphere even in wider shots or when she is not the focal point.

To sum up, returning to the Fiona Apple song mentioned at the start, as Lea grows closer to Rune and drifts away from Sasha and others her age, it becomes clear that despite all her efforts to lose weight and become the person others expect, what drives her most is the desire for someone to want her body as it is now, not in the future, after the excess weight is gone. For as her friends fulfill this need in the present, without the conditions she faces, she wants the same. In other words, “while I’m in this body, I want someone to want…“; the most important part being, in my current body as the person I am right now.