‘The Anchorage’ looks at rhythms of life in a beautiful meditation

Published 6:32 pm Thursday, October 21, 2010

Every morning the main character in “The Anchorage” goes walking through the woods of her remote island home and takes a brief swim in the cold sea water.

The film wants you to dive in, too: into its contemplative mood and lack of conventional story. This movie is about a particular place and the way time passes in a different way in a life cut off from deadlines and bustle.

So you’ll either have to immerse yourself in the film or it will become wallpaper. But this kind of movie can become like a visit to a monastery, full of the sounds of nature and the observation of tasks performed in real time.

The woman taking the swim, played by Ulla Edstrom, lives in her forest cabin on a Swedish island. Three days pass, framed by her ritual bathing.

At first her daughter and boyfriend are around, but then they depart. For the rest of the movie, the woman goes fishing, visits town and listens to the radio in her otherwise silent home.

Something about listening to the radio in this quiet setting made the movie suddenly click into place for me. The sense of being away and alone, for long unstructured hours at a time, with only the radio as a close companion — this all feels exactly right.

Actually the hours aren’t exactly unstructured: We see that the woman has certain things she does in a certain way. The repeated sequence of her going for her morning swim suggests that she probably treats everything in this fashion.

Co-directed by C.W. Winter and the cinematographer Anders Edstrom (that’s his mother in the lead role), “The Anchorage” is beautiful to look at and listen to. The title suggests something, too: not just the physical location, but perhaps a comment about how people anchor their lives in repeated daily rituals, especially during times of loss — tiny fragments of dialogue suggest that the woman has lost her husband sometime not long before we meet her.

The filmmakers introduce a nearly subliminal note of suspense, in the form of a man dressed in the bright garb of a hunter. We see him walking past in the background of a few shots and the woman notices his presence.

The final repetition of her swim is different and suggests that her Eden might be affected by this mysterious new presence. Perhaps this new note was not even necessary in the overall scheme of the film, because the invitation to meditate turns out to be powerful enough.

“The Anchorage”

A nonnarrative look at the rhythms of life for a woman living on a Swedish island. No story, but the movie’s quiet, real-time observations of her daily rituals will have a meditative effect if you’re willing to immerse yourself in this kind of experience. In Swedish, with English subtitles.

Rated: Not rated; probably R for nudity

Showing: Northwest Film Forum