This is a sad and tragic tale. It was released with English subtitles as A YOUNG WOMAN IS MISSING. The film is interesting in several ways. For one thing, it shows what life was like in Oslo a few years after the Nazis left. Everyone wears their overcoats indoors most of the time because there is not enough heat for the houses. The streets and many homes are extremely grim and desolate. The story concerns a young married woman named Eva who suddenly vanishes. But we do not then have a police investigation film, instead we have a series of flashbacks which explain everything step by step. Eva is a very naïve country girl with little education. She has a sweet nature. She is married to an archaeologist. In fact, there is one exterior scene where we see them both coming out of the new Kon Tiki Huset, an archaeological museum created by Thor Heyerdahl. Eva's husband Dr. Berger is heavily intellectual, and his social friends are also. Eva feels crushed by their supercilious put-downs, due to their being intellectual snobs without even realizing it. She feels inadequate and worthless. But she has worse problems than that, of which her husband has been blissfully unaware. And through the flashbacks of her history told by her previous lover, a drug addict, we learn the full horror of what Eva has gone through and continues to go through. We are therefore the horrified viewers of what morphine addiction was like. The film then turns into a tale of addiction, and what it does to people's lives. Can Eva be found? Can she be saved? The performance of Astri Jacobsen as Eva is very touching. The film was directed by a woman, Edith Carlmar (1911-2003), who was also an actress, and she appears uncredited in the scenes in the pharmacy. It is doubtful whether a man could have directed this film with the same amount of empathy. Carlmar later appeared as an actress in a feature film and also subsequently a mini-series about the author Knut Hamsun, one of Norway's Nobel Prize Winners for Literature.
Review of A Young Woman Missing
