52 Films by Women Vol 10. 7. LIVE A LITTLE (Leva lite) (Director: Fanny Ovesen)
The omens surface early as Laura attends to a blister on her
heel, caused whilst wearing hiking boots, even though she has just got off the
train. Alex mocks her for bringing a first aid kit. She too has bad news. The
host for their first night’s stay has cancelled. Keen to avoid hostels and
hotels – less money for alcohol, I suppose – they reach out online to kind
nationals of the country that they are in to put them up for a few days.
Apparently, this is a common practice, appealing to individuals with spare
rooms who want to get to know the bathroom habits of fellow Europeans. While sitting
in the middle of a neighbourhood looking for potential sponsors, Alex and Laura
meet Kaspar (Filip Zareba), who chats to them in English. Incidentally, no one
speaks to them in Swedish except this one guy in Berlin who recites a headline
about a woman cutting a man’s penis off; goodness knows why he thought this
might be a quick way to make friends and influence people. Kaspar offers to
take the pair out the following evening – ‘add me on Snapchat’ – but not to be
their host. This falls to Andrzej (Lukasz Hecman), who answers their appeal and
greets them in his wheelchair. He immediately serves them a meal (with vodka,
of course) and introduces them to fellow couch vegetable, Lucas (Oscar Lesage).
Lucas is socially awkward but recognises communist architecture when he sees it
– this could account for his lack of friends. He is Parisian who imparts two
pieces of crucial information to Laura: he lives near the catacombs and there’s
an Italian ice cream place nearby that has much to recommend it.
Sociability breeds itself. Laura invites Lucas to join them
on their night out with Kaspar, whom Alex has clocked as a potential unfriend
with benefits. It isn’t long before the three of them enter a nightclub with
flashing lights and a throbbing baseline. Shots are taken.
In order to convey an evening going swiftly out of control,
Ovesen decreases the length of scenes before she cuts to the next location,
fragmenting the action. Details cease to matter. Alcohol consumption and
dancing are constant. A man has something important (and prejudiced) to say
about gay sex, you die when you’re thirty. ‘How old are you now?’ he is asked.
‘Twenty-nine,’ the man replies. Ovesen captures well a young person’s inflated
sense of catastrophe, before, of course, they experience a totally justified
response to a bad situation.
Alex disappears, leaving Lucas to take Laura back to their
accommodation. Laura can remember nothing about it. She wakes up in bed naked and
spots a used condom on the floor. Horrified, she concludes that sex took place.
She has been unfaithful to her boyfriend, who, as she found out before party
night, was given time off work and is travelling to Prague to be with her on
the weekend. Alex isn’t happy about this (for different reasons). However, the
next host has agreed to accept a third person. Dressing herself quickly, Laura
slips out of the room. She watches Lucas return from the bathroom, open the
door to his room but say nothing about Laura’s absence. (C’est normal, non?) Alex
returns. Andrzej has made coffee. Laura is the last to receive a cup. She doesn’t
need oat milk; she’s not a vegan.
It isn’t long before Andrzej says farewell to his Swedish
guests and Alex and Laura head for Prague; one of the pleasures of the film is
noting the increasing modernity of the trains on which they travel. Laura
confesses her infidelity to Alex. Of course, she can’t tell Elias. But should
she? One of the film’s stylistic devices has Laura stare at a photograph on her
Instagram page, Ovesen cutting to a flashback of a moment that gave rise to it.
Laura relives snapshots of her past with Elias, the good stuff. It isn’t long
before she is standing on a Prague subway platform waiting for Elias to appear.
What happened to standing outside a station? One reason: easier to obtain
permission to film.
Alex isn’t super pleased to see Elias – he’s not exactly Mr
Fun Times. Still, she and the group’s host give the couple some alone time,
playing cards on the roof. ‘You cheated,’ says the host. ‘I did not,’ counters
Alex. ‘You’ve played the game before,’ insists the host. ‘That’s not cheating.’
Meanwhile Laura and Elias get super physical, the former conspicuously not
pleasured. Elias is concerned. Then Laura tells him about Warsaw and he’s out
of the bed and sulking naked on the floor in quick time. The host walks in.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks Elias, getting the film’s biggest laugh. Something cannot
continue as before.
As this point, I crave the indulgence of my reader. If you
have any interest in seeing this film, read no further, but take my word
that it is entertaining, insightful and worth ninety-eight minutes of your time
(including the cool music over the end credits). If you are keen to discover what
happens next, here goes.
Pictured: Travelling companions Alex (Aviva Wrede) and Laura (Embla Ingelman-Sundberg) in a scene from Swedish writer-director Fanny Ovesen's debut feature, 'Leva Lite' ('Live a Little'). Still courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures / Scandinavian Film Distribution
Laura tries to appease Elias. She didn’t remember anything
of the night in bed with Lucas. She does not know if he gave her pleasure. She tells
Ellias that she is willing to return to Sweden with him. He is pleased by this,
but then Laura has to tell Alex. She pads to Laura’s room. Can she let her
friend down? No reader, she cannot. Instead, she returns to her room and, being
super honest, tells Elias she didn’t tell Laura her decision. Elias dresses,
slings his backpack over one shoulder, the international signifier of being
cheesed off, and departs. When we next see Laura and Alex, they are on their
way to Berlin.
There is a lingering question: did Lucas have non-consensual
sex with Laura while she was unconscious? Laura insists that she is not a
victim. Throughout we see flashes of what may have happened. A tilted paper
cup. Laura and Lucas on a tram. Laura leaning on Lucas as they leave the tram.
Laura leaving the tram with Lucas then crouching to vomit. These aren’t
memories. Rather Laura imagines what might have happened. Her preoccupations
threaten to reduce Laura and Alex’s fun time to zero.
In Berlin, the pair share a flat with a group of travellers,
including an Israeli man who appeared on a reality TV show. No one talks about
Palestine, which is a topic too far. A woman dances in her room semi-clothed.
This lifts Laura’s mood. ‘You can’t be a third wheel,’ Alex tells her. ‘There
are many people here.’ A man describes Greta Thunberg as a superhero, before
criticising her. ‘She’s just a kid.’ ‘We’re the same age,’ Alex tells him. ‘You
wouldn’t say that [call her a kid], if she were a man.’ ‘But she’s not,’ insists
Mr Barely Conscious Bias. The group visit an abandoned East Berlin housing
block previously occupied by squatters and check out the artwork they left
behind. Berlin’s cool like that. Then the group goes to a night time party.
Having relieved a man of his bottle of whiskey, the guy with extremely limited
Swedish who initially thought she was Danish, Alex relieves herself in the undergrowth
and attracts the attention of a shady Berliner, joint hanging from his lips. Alex
plucks it from his mouth and inhales. ‘First time in Berlin?’ he asks in
English. ‘Maybe,’ Alex replies. He shows her a transparent plastic bag
containing pink tablets – bad pharma. Alex is on the precipice. The shifty
Berliner grins. ‘Afterwards, will you have sex with me?’ Alex leaves him to find
Laura. ‘Where were you?’ Alex asks. ‘I saw you go off with a stranger.’ Laura
could say the same. Neither Alex nor Laura engage in casual sex that night.
At a later point, Alex is distraught. ‘I’m the girl everyone
wants to have sex with, but no one wants to be with.’ Laura assures her that
isn’t the case. From this we sense that Alex wants to be like Laura, to be
monogamous. She confesses that she wanted to be with Kaspar and no one else.
The final train journey takes the pair to Paris. They stay
in a hotel. Laura leaves her best friend behind. She takes the Metro to the
catacombs, finds the Italian ice cream parlour. We see her sitting on the
pavement, a half-eaten cup of ice cream next to her. She spies Lucas heading to
an apartment building with his bicycle. As the door closes behind him, Laura
grabs it and slips through. When Lucas parks his bike, he spots her. She tells
him about the fig flavoured ice cream that she ate. Entering his apartment,
which is in a complete mess as all stereotypically male apartments are, Laura
asks for a glass of water. Then, in an attempt to discover whether she could
experience greater sexual pleasure with Lucas than with Elias, who has posted
on social media that he has a new girlfriend, Laura makes her move. The gesture
too will determine whether she was violated by Lucas. I won’t describe the
outcome, but it isn’t conclusive.
There is only one thing certain about the end of the trip:
Laura and Alex remain friends. The film acknowledges that in life there are
some experiences you will never truly square away. The important thing is to
acknowledge when something doesn’t feel right, when the person you thought you
might share your life with is insufficiently stimulating. Experiences test us
and make us see more clearly. This is exactly the point of Ovesen’s excellent
film.
Reviewed at Glasgow Film Festival, Scotland, Glasgow Film
Theatre Screen Three, Monday 2 March 2026, 20:50 screening
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