Were it not for that constant pressure on her nostrils that gives off strange smells, perhaps Rakel (Kristine Thorp) would not have realised she was pregnant. Rakel is a 23-year-old Norwegian girl with a single focus in life: drawing comics, but she is afraid of it. Like any artist, whose creativity is a sacred part of herself, she finds it hard to put herself to the test: failure would bring down the only security of his protracted teenage life, into which an unwanted child suddenly drops. Thus begins ‘Ninjababy’ by Yngvild Sve Flikke, acclaimed as “Best Comedy” at the European Film Awards, which conquers with its fiercely feminist outlook, intended as a willingness to rip apart the hypocrisy of divisions between male and female behaviour. Rakel swears; if she feels like having an extreme night out, she does drugs and has sex in response to a need very similar to hunger. Motherhood is not like the propensity to draw: it is definitely not part of Rakel’s self. It is not just a matter of time and maturity, it is a nature that Rakel strongly claims against all forms of ‘racism’ that necessarily want to turn a woman into a happy mother at some point. Only one other recent film contemplated the lack of desire for motherhood in terms of personal determination, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Lost Daughter’ (2021) with Olivia Colman. With pregnancy test in hand, the girl is forced to awaken from her torpor and think about the life of another human being. Thus begins, through the hunt for the most suitable parent, a dialogue with the polemical foetus, a politically uncorrect confrontation full of Inga Sætre’s animations. Director Flikke does not present Rakel as an outcast: she may not have the parachute of a family, but her strength is her independence. Rakel’s confusion is the same confusion that many young people experience when entering the world, in the difficulty of finding secure affection, in arriving at the precipice of adult life without clear ideas. But she never loses her tenderness, a certain way of being awkward and insecure that makes her irresistible, like a bewildered young girl who is afraid to go and get an abortion on her own and is accompanied by the boy who smells of butter and who may be the father of the child in spite of all romanticism. Read more on IMDb
