Reprise

Joachim Trier
2006

Joachim Trier’s debut feature Reprise is a solid art house import with an incisively penetrating tendency towards character study – a film that elegantly portrays the youthful condition in which anything is possible, both for better and for worse. Despite the remarkable display of candor and insight there is an unpleasant degree of filler in the form of woefully conventional and hackneyed devices: the party scene music video, the young protagonist meeting and receiving advice from his hero, the boorish fratboy eventually sucking face with a girl he had previously offended, and a wedding epilogue. Ironically these are all clichés that the two young authors at the center of Reprise would find genuinely hokey.
Fast friends Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) chide each other and giggle nervously as they are preparing to send out their first manuscripts to publishers. A self-conscious zoom into the mailbox-slot heightens the couple’s anxious optimism and zips ahead in time to where the butterflies have subsided and we find that gaunt, beaky Phillip’s book has achieved a minor cult success leading to a heavy dose of insecurity and psychological damage. Erik, disappointed but undaunted by his manuscript’s rejection, continues plugging away while becoming increasingly wary of Phillip’s fragile wellbeing.

The majority of the film’s success lies in the tremendous performances of these lead roles. Erik’s “straight-man” is full of youthful yearning and a palpable striving for greatness, which Trier takes to task by imbuing the blonde moppet with a harmlessly comic does of pretension. The film starts in earnest with Phillip being released from the pysch-ward after a suicide attempt, and the core of Danielsen Lie’s performance suggests a jaded world-weariness so profound that becomes no longer a question of whether he’ll publish another novel, but whether he’ll make it through the night. Its a show-stealing performance in which nearly every scene involving Phillip is so charged with tension, so riddled with anxiety, that there’s a strong element of classic suspense ingrained within the drama.

On the periphery of these sad young literary men are friends, girls, and the humdrum lull of life in Oslo. Phillip’s girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge) is primarily, though unintentionally, responsible for his growing dementia, and their mutual refusal to let go is a constant source of concern. Its not hard to see how one could lose his mind over such a gal considering that Winge’s radiant beauty is frequently and hungrily meditated upon in Trier’s starry-eyed lens. If there’s such a thing as “screen presence,” than she’s got it in spades. Most of Erik and Phillip’s leisure time is spent with a small coterie of friends, mostly ex-punks who’ve eased into advertising jobs and chronic beer swilling. These are the kind of guys who will keep one grounded, a colorful and necessary entourage of jokesters that adds a sense of fun and lightheartedness to a film mainly concerned with a pair of heavy-minded boys.

While many of the stylistic devices in Reprise verge on annoying, (superfluous use of flashbacks, an amateurish reliance on voiceover) the use of sound in key emotional scenes is stunning. Many conversations between Phillip and Kari are imbued with a poetic disjoint between sound and image, with conversation taking place while the screen presents tender touches, and close-ups of neck napes, hair wisps, and furtive glances. It would be the stuff of cheesy romance fiction were it not handled with Trier’s exuberant heart-on-sleeve sensibility – the kind of openness and vulnerability presented by many great authors.
While all the cutesy male bonding and quasi-macho pose is funny and familiar, the depiction of women is a bit troubling. When Phillip flies Kari to Paris in an identically retrace of the trip where they fell in love, she’s subjected to some of Phillip’s most unhinged mental malaise yet acts fairly oblivious to the awful position she’s been thrust into. Its an outrageous display of passivity, more the fault of the script and direction than that of the actress. Meanwhile Erik’s long-suffering girlfriend is used more as a device then presented as a real character. Finally, there’s plenty of discussion between the boys about how women are the bane of male creativity. None of this proves to be much of a deal-breaker however, as Trier’s light touch prevents things from becoming a royal PC bummer.