Reprise

It is often said that it is very hard to make movies about artists, especially writers, and especially ones who could possibly be read as author surrogates for the creative principles behind the film. But Norwegian Joachim Trier’s Reprise, which Scott Rudin approved and Miramax distributed, is a minor miracle, stylish and suave, touching and humorous, and an eminently watchable film about ambitious, literary twentysomethings.

It is story of two Olso-based, twenty-three-year-old novelists, Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie), blond and seemingly well adjusted, still living with his mother and hiding his girlfriend from his rambunctious buddies, and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner), dark, brooding, and passionate, the first of the duo to see publication. The film spends much energy imagining how their dreams of duel literary stardom could play out and how the limitations of both artmaking and lovemaking can often guarantee nothing but loneliness, heartbreak, and insecurity. Reprise succeeds in making the clichés about writers, both young and old, seem new and fully informed by authentic human experience. Its two non-actors (Lie now studies acting, Klouman-Hoiner remains the medical student he was when Trier found him) offer the kind of nuanced, tricky performances rarely glimpsed in the uninitiated.

Trier’s film is digressive, lyrical, and a bit punk rock. He deftly weaves in and out of the filmic present, juxtaposing the duo’s slowly fracturing social group of horny, self-absorbed, exceedingly well read, post-collegiate lit boys with the aftermath of Erik’s retreat from literary ambition, coming on the heels of successful publication and a torrid romantic meltdown. Philip’s novel has been rejected by several houses but seems to be gaining traction, while his commitment to his safe, comfy girlfriend begins to waver. Philip’s relationship couldn’t be any more different from Erik’s, obsessed with cherry-haired Kari (Victoria Winge), who falls for him after he asks her to follow him to Paris on their second encounter, igniting a series of passionate episodes that ends in suspicion, slit wrists, and tears.

Clearly early Truffaut is an influence, but Trier reaches further into pre-New Wave gallic cinema when constructing the sequence in which Erik tries to rekindle his passion with Kari, revisiting and reconstructing their first Paris escapade with devastating results, a melancholy tone poem that recalls the Alain Resnais of Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad.

Trier’s film is digressive, lyrical, and a bit punk rock -; it never stagnates or resolves to toil in the formally predictable; it engages us in an experience with artistic influence, with the all-too- common lack of self-knowledge that even the most gifted and conscious of us can exhibit. Reprise makes no false moves. It allows you to see the world new again.

                                                              Brandon Harris