Karin remembers herself in a picture from when she was 16 years old, taken by A in Paris in 1983. Her shoulders are exposed and she’s wearing long earrings. The photograph no longer exists but she’s trying to piece together, now as a 55-year-old author in Oslo, how the photograph came to be. Karin speaks to her shadow-sister, ‘you’, who has followed her since childhood. The shadow-sister disappeared for a while but has now come back to her in middle age and won’t leave her alone.
Karin met A for the first time in an elevator in New York. He calls Maxine, an agent, to set up a meeting between them. Karin is living with her actress-mother. She rarely attends school, faking her mother’s signature on the notices of absence. Karin has later searched on the internet for A’s and Maxine’s names to find recordings of their voices, hoping it will spark her memory from those days. She doesn’t find anything. Karin has forgotten a lot from those years, not just because she drank a lot – her brain just has blackouts in memory from that time.
A invites Karin for a drink in his apartment. He suggests she go with him to Paris for a photoshoot; he works for French Vogue. Karin’s mother forbids her to go. Then she takes Karin shopping for new clothes for the trip. She doesn’t remember much from the trip, other than – That she’s lost. She doesn’t know her way around Paris and asks a couple for help, she has forgotten where her hotel is. They decline to help. Someone helps her find A’s apartment, she has his address on a piece of paper.
Karin tries to remember what she knew back then. She knew that A was a 44-year-old man. She wonders if he still remembers her? In the Paris photo studio, Claude, A’s friend, speaks to Karin about one of the other models, Jane, calling her “a piece of sex”.
In Oslo, the pandemic is ongoing. Karin’s daughter Eva studies with strangers online. Karin walks the dog. She has lied about working on her book – in fact, she goes back to bed when her husband and daughter leave the house. She speaks to the shadow-sister, telling her she feels surrounded. She speaks with her mother on the phone about alcoholism and how they both drank in New York.
Karin remembers being in a club with some of the older girls in Paris. Two men approach her on the dancefloor and grab her, saying they want to see her naked. She runs to the older girls, the men follow. One of the men says that Karin is “so wet.” Karin protests and the girls mock her, asking her what she’s doing here if she can’t even take being felt up. Karin runs out into the streets of Paris. Earlier, she was in A’s apartment. She has asked him if he knows the address to her hotel; she never managed to get it. He says he doesn’t know but makes her write down his address on a piece of paper. They have to go to a dinner at Z’s house now, there’s no time to go to her hotel.
Karin wants to collect the bits of the woman she is in 2021 and the girl she was in 1983 into one body. She remembers lying naked in A’s bed, feeling his penis hard against her thigh. Karin speaks to the shadow-sister, remembering how she came back, feeling wrapped up in her. She feels her presence like a red bird, sitting on her shoulder, pecking her in the ear. She can’t get rid of the bird.
When she was preparing for her confirmation as a teenager, Karin would be picked up by a chauffeur and taken to the church every week for her classes. The chauffeur asked her to sit on the front seat and said she looked like Twiggy in her short skirt. Every time, he would put his hand between her legs. Karin has found a picture of herself from that time. She looks sad.
Karin is experiencing sleeplessness in Oslo. Cold sweats and feeling hot, she keeps her husband awake at night for as long as she can. When he finally falls asleep, she lays with the dog listening to its deep breathing. She sees dr. Hegg, a psychiatrist, who wants to prescribe her antidepressants and sleeping pills. She says she was just looking for comfort. Dr. Hegg does not offer comfort.
At Z’s house, dinner is nowhere in sight. They drink. There are a lot of other models. As they dance, the men look at them. A girl in a red top accuses Karin of only being there because she is sleeping with A. Karin denies this. The girls convince Karin to go clubbing with them without A.
As a 12-year-old, Karin is serving drinks at her mother’s party. A man says she has an ass which will be gorgeous soon. It’s the first time a man has looked at her and told her what he sees. After graduating school at 16, Karin hosts a secret party and loses her virginity to Eirik, an older student. She falls asleep in the sun the next morning and all her skin peels off under her breasts from the sunburn. The scar is the only thing Karin has left of the 16-year-old girl.
A let’s her into his apartment. He is good at using his tongue, she comes almost at once. “Don’t stop.”, Karin says. He turns her around, is not done with her yet. She feels like a child. She throws up in his toilet afterwards.
A calls Karin in New York a few weeks after Paris. He wants to see her. She promises to come. Karin thinks it’s interesting how A thought of her then, and how much she thinks of him now.
She remembers looking at A while he’s sleeping, old and ugly, his penis is flaccid. He wakes up and draws her close, she feels his penis against her. Afterwards, she throws up again and again in his toilet. A drives her to the hotel in Paris, he knew her address after all. Karin calls her mother, who is worried. She wants to go home, but only manages to say, “I have to go.”
Karin remembers how her father was put in hospital when she was a child, due to his depression and anxiety. He said she has a shadow-sister, but that Karin is stronger than her, she will get through anything. Karin feels her mother’s life and her own are marked by love and forgetting.
A takes pictures of her in Paris. They keep having sex. After a few days, Karin cries in his car and says she wants to go back to New York. He calls her a little shit-girl, wasting her potential.
Karin meets with Eva during the pandemic. Eva is 18 soon, there’s so much Karin would like to tell her about all those who came before, about her life, but this is not what Eva needs from Karin.
As promised, Karin goes to see A in his New York studio after Paris. She finds Claude there. He says A won’t be back for a while, beckons her to sit on his lap. He undresses her and fondles her breasts. Maxine walks in on them. Shortly after, Karin is told that she will never be photographed again, she has no future, as she is not serious enough about her career.
It hasn’t eradicated her. It won’t go away but there is greater space inside her now to take it. She remembers how the light from A’s apartment fell on both herself and the shadow-sister.