Norwegians, like the rest of the Western world, are no saints when it comes to politics or (over)consumption. In the first scenes of Petter Næss’s No Comment, a robot vacuum cleaner gets tangled in a pair of tights left on the floor of the fictitious Norwegian Prime Minister Alma Solvik ‘s (Laila Goody; pictured above) residence. In an age dominated by AI, there is something oddly comforting in this small moment of mechanical failure – a brief reminder that machines still can’t fully master the chaos we create.Yet another image rises uninvited: footage from a beach in Ghana, where locals battle the “tentacles” of discarded textiles washed ashore. Dead white man’s clothes reach everywhere…
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Purchasing your identity
As a political comedy, No Comment is built on exaggeration and performance. Yet the film’s extensive parade of clothing raises the question of where mockery ends and material reality begins. One thing is clear – clothes are not just props here. They function as a narrative backbone. They construct identities, shape characters, and allow them to slip in and out of the roles the script demands. Costume shifts signal changes in allegiance and status. PR strategist Karianne (Pia Tjelta; pictured below) leaves a testosterone-soaked meeting wearing hair extensions and an urban glam look, only to reappear in the Prime Minister’s office as a sharp, short-haired power woman.
Society at large demands similar transformations. In that sense, reality itself becomes a kind of performance – almost comedic in its constant costume changes. “Thanks” to (ultra)fast fashion, nearly anyone can purchase the identity required for the day. The film’s rhythm of clothing consumption mirrors European habits. According to the European Environment Agency, the average EU citizen buys around 19 kg of textiles a year and discards about 16 kg. Garments appear in the frame and disappear just as quickly – an immaculate metaphor for Western consumption patterns. The same outfit is rarely worn twice, at least not for any of life’s — or the film’s — “important” moments.
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Clothes require TLC
No Comment foregrounds something cinema often hides: the material labour behind clothing. Historical films occasionally give us glimpses of washerwomen, but here, in the midst of a political scandal, we encounter ironing boards and drying racks. Whether these serve as metaphors for “washing the dirt clean,” as humorous contrasts, or as subtle critiques of gendered domestic labour is open to interpretation. What is certain is that they remind us that clothes require work, care, time – they do not simply vanish after performing their narrative function. When I sat down to watch the film, I did not expect it to highlight the materiality of clothing so boldly. Considering Norway’s strong position in wardrobe studies and its role in EU textile-waste policy discussions, perhaps this attention to detail should not come as a surprise – but on screen, it feels refreshingly new.
No Comment leaves us with a simple, unsettling truth: clothes are everywhere, shaping us, trailing us, outliving us. All we have to do is look. And when we do, we see that neither a robot vacuum cleaner nor innovation can turn old clothes into new ones. That responsibility remains with us – with homo consumericus.
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No Comment showed in the Official Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival – the two images in this article are film stills.
