Netflix | ★★★✩✩
I’d never really considered quite how different the two places are. Regardless of climate, Norway is relatively homogenous, reserved, conservative, prim. And Israel? Well, you know. I can see how the idea of a co-production between the two countries could result in something exciting, how transposing Nordic noir to the Middle East might create something new (Shnordic Noir?), or at least how the contrast should work to throw their individual qualities into relief. Unfortunately, it seems that when they made The Girl from Oslo, they decided to also bring over everything else from Norway, so that instead of a partner, Israel is transformed into merely a location.
The protagonist of the title is Pia, unbeknownst to her parents seemingly visiting Israel on holiday. Its Norwegian title, Bortført, translated as Abduction, or the Israeli title, Azharat Masa —Travel Advisory, should give some clue as to what happens when Pia takes a trip down to Sinai with two Israeli siblings. When I went to Dahab in the 90s, a boy in our taxi had a meltdown after eating all his leftover drugs rather than try to smuggle them back into Israel. Poor old Pia and her mates are kidnapped by Isis. I still maintain that my experiences would make a more entertaining watch than the desert elements, but the bulk of the show is really in the efforts taken behind the scenes to try to get her back.
Maybe it’s a case of too many cooks, as directing duties are shared between Stian Kristiansen and Uri Barbash, and writing between Kyrre Holm Johannessen and Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz. I’ll leave you to make an educated guess as to who represents who, but the result is pickled herring rather than chopped, so it’s clear who ended up with the upper hand. The overwrought music, minimalist location design for the Israeli interiors, the overall stageyness, provide everything with a dated European sheen. Where’s the messiness, the energy, the passion of the Israeli side? The entire production, even the acting, feels neutered, so that even though each of the ten episodes is only 30 minutes long, the action still drags, clocks are watched.
Reasons to cling on come in the form of the next inevitable twist, but they follow the law of diminishing returns, as coincidence piles upon coincidence. The first of these is so heavily signposted that when we eventually reach the destination, you want to reach into the screen to grab the character involved and shout, “She’s your daughter dummy!” No one’s a good enough actor to portray someone that dense.
What is clever though is tying in the Oslo Accords as a narrative jumping off point, and with a crew and cast consisting of Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, Israeli Jews, and Norwegians, you’d hope this could signal how the creative industries can be a tool for bringing people together. It’s a shame then in the second episode, when a totally unnecessary and unconnected slice of propaganda is shoehorned into a scene in Gaza as Pia’s mother arrives at a hospital.
It’s not that the series is terrible, it’s just more of a lost opportunity, and it has obviously done some stuff right to be in Netflix’s Top 10 most watched series in 36 countries. But its quadrilingual nature doesn’t just make it a chore to discover the correct configuration to watch it, (Hebrew with English subtitles), it makes it the Tower of Babel of TV, where you wish they’d just scatter everyone back to their own parts of the world.