Friday, June 6, 2008

Movie review: Reprise

Dangerous bicycle games.

By John P. Meyer

Reprise

Erik and Phillip are trying to make it as writers. Erik is rejected by publishers as lacking in talent, while Phillip's manuscript is accepted and the young man becomes a major name on the Norwegian cultural scene practically overnight. Six months later, Erik and his friends come to visit Phillip at a psychiatric hospital to bring him home after long-term treatment. Writing is the last thing on Phillip's mind, but Erik is continuing his literary attempts and tries to convince his friend to go back to writing.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Reprise

Reprise (2006) is director/writer Joachim Trier's first feature film. Being a Norwegian language production (and also having been filmed there), it qualified for the 2007 Amanda Awards, Norway's equivalent of the Oscars - only colder and with more fjords.

It won the big Amandas, including the ones for Best Direction, Best Film and Best Screenplay (which Trier co-wrote with Eskil Vogt). Furthermore, it earned Trier the coveted Golden Tulip for Best Film at the Istanbul International Film Festival.

With lots of additional international exposure and the 2007 Sundance festival under its belt, this introspective, moody, slightly Bergmanesque drama is now getting a limited release in Dallas at the Magnolia thanks to the Landmark folks.

The story centers on two young Oslo chaps named Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) and Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie), both of whom harbor writing ambitions. As we pick up their story, the close friends are dropping their manuscripts in the mailbox to send off to publishers.

The fact that this will not be a straightforward dramatic narrative is demonstrated by the fact that the next several minutes of screen time are given over to a whirlwind alternate future reality glimpse of events to follow, at the start of which we are told by the narrator that this is what MIGHT have happened, IF. (Which, we are led to believe, it did not.)

Philip (foreground) and Erik: novelists

What really ends up happening is that Philip's novel is published and he becomes something of a celebrity. But as we've always been led to believe about Scandinavians (think long winters and hours spent brooding over the works of Strindberg and Kierkegaard), success does not confer happiness. In Philip's case, in fact, it has quite the opposite effect, and he ends up - following a brief but unsatisfactory love affair - in the psychiatric ward of an Oslo hospital.

Much of the story is told in flashbacks (and - as mentioned - speculative, alternate reality flash forwards). Thus, after Erik and the rest of Philip's klatch of friends drive him home following his release from the psych ward, we are treated to a flashback detailing the way he met and hooked up with the petite and lovely Kari (played by the elfin Viktoria Winge). Without a great deal of preliminary wooing, Philip invites Kari on a trip to Paris, where we are given to understand that they more-or-less enjoy themselves. "Philip's sarcastic humor made her gasp with laughter," the narrator avows.

Kari: cute, yes. But is she cool?

But - though Kari is cute - can she also be cool? According to klatch member Lars (Christian Rubeck) - known surreptitiously as "porno Lars" thanks to an incident involving the aforementioned Kierkegaard - girls as a group are simply incapable of being cool in a fundamental way, and thus time spent with them should be limited to rolls in the hay (or the Scandinavian equivalent), followed by a post-haste return to the all-male philosophers club. Ironically (though entirely unsurprisingly), Lars ends up as the most besmitten of all the deep thinking buds; as the rest of the group peer in on him through a dining room window as he's having dinner at his new steady girlfriend's house, Henning (Henrik Elvestad) can be heard to murmur, "I can't take it - it's too sad."

A perfect universe of freckles

Erik, meanwhile, has reworked his initial script and had it re-evaluated by the publisher, who is now prepared to fire up the presses. It's while negotiating terms of the book deal (including a suggested title change) that Erik meets Johanne (Rebekka Karijord), the publisher's comely assistant. When Johanne is introduced to Erik's philosopher-boys-club buds at what passes for a beach in Norway (it's actually a wooden pier overlooking a harbor, with fjords ominously lurking somewhere off-camera), she senses a certain animosity amongst the assemblage. Oddly, the disapproval doesn't seem to diminish after she strips down to her teenie weenie bikini bathing suit, exposing an eye-popping universe of freckles. Tough guy Henning makes a good initial impression by pissing her off philosophically, so naturally they end up getting hitched before the end credits. (Even tough-talking Norwegian guys are not immune to delightfully freckled females, regardless of their social and political leanings.)

If this is all beginning to sound more internalized than action-oriented, remember that Northern European climes encourage the sorts of lives of the mind in which spirited discussion and intellectual ponderings are perceived to be as stimulating as, say, getting raving drunk while listening to punk metal bands - which the characters also do in the course of the movie.

The male-supremest, pseudo-intellectual Norwegian youth klatch

There a smidgen of action (and loads of tension) when Philip, in a devil-may-care mood, throws caution to the wind and coasts downhill on his bicycle with his eyes closed while counting to ten - through street intersections where cars are passing. It's a nail-bitingly tense scene - perhaps the most memorable in the movie.

Director Trier's cinematographic style is hand-held mobile without being annoyingly shaky, and he makes liberal use of extreme close-ups - mostly involving hands and fingers, something to do with reaching out and grasping as an embedded metaphorical subext, perhaps. Contemplative silences aplenty appear in the stream of the cinematic narrative, connoting deep thought. I'm pretty sure.

Much of the tension in the film stems from our uncertainty as to whether Philip will try to kill himself (Hey, it is Scandinavia, remember?), while much of the plot is given over to the troubled relationships Philip and Erik each have with their girlfriends. Like Strindberg, they appear to be doomed to failure in their dealings with women. Maybe that's just the price serious writers must pay for their art - in Norway.

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