Battle (2018)

Battle, a 2018 Norwegian production directed by Katarina Launing, concerns Amalie, a young dancer with good looks, money, a boyfriend, and a talent for movement. Her world collapses when her family's finances do, and she relocates to a less forgiving milieu where she encounters Mikael, who dances in the streets. There are dance battles. There is a romance. The film runs its course with the efficiency of a well-rehearsed routine, and the audience knows every step before it lands.

The picture arrives with a modest set of culturally aware credentials, though they are worn lightly. Launing directs, and her heroine carries the narrative, which registers as a mild feminist gesture without any accompanying sermon on the subject. The cast is drawn from a range of ethnic backgrounds, a fact the film treats as ordinary, which is the correct approach and also the least remarkable. The wealthy family's fall from fortune never becomes an indictment of capital. No character wrestles with identity as a thesis. Nobody explains the environment to anyone.

The remainder is a genre exercise: teen romance, street dance, Scandinavian competence. The film has no interest in instructing its viewers on how to live, which after a long diet of sermonizing cinema comes as a small relief. Its progressive features are structural, incidental, present because the story needed a girl who dances and a city that contains many kinds of people. We assign it the low end of the register, where it sits comfortably. A pleasant film, an unremarkable specimen, and a reminder that not every work of art is trying to correct us.