“Reprise,” a film by Joachim Trier

By Lisa Peet

Joachim Trier’s debut feature film, Reprise, opens at a self-conscious turning point: Phillip (Anders Danielson Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner), twentyish writers and friends since grade school, are about to drop their respective manuscripts into a yawning Oslo mailbox. The envelopes land inside, launching a rapid-fire, future-conditional, split-screen daydream of how they envision their brilliant careers from that point on: women conquered, literary revolutions sparked, expatriation and reunion, all in the space of a minute. “This is where it all begins,” says Phillip. In a nice touch, when their future-conditional novels are flipped over by an anonymous hand, the black-and-white author photos come to life and grin self-consciously at each other.

The story begins here, but proceeds in anything but a straight line. Narrative is intercut with flashbacks and flash-forwards, fantasy sequences and asides, often not immediately evident which is which. The film demands attention and a willingness to trust Trier and his cowriter, Eskil Vogt, to give us a story we’ll understand. And, ultimately, they do. “Reprise” is the tale of a couple of Young Literary Men running up against the real world, told with genuine affection for both the characters and the audience.

After a headlong foray into the theoretical future, the film rewinds to real time. Erik’s novel is rejected right away, and Phillip’s is accepted and published to some acclaim. But Phillip is fragile, and the sudden spotlight sends him into a breakdown and six months in a psychiatric hospital. Erik and their circle of friends rally around him on his release, and their stories spin out from there.

Although the film is about the creative class — chiefly writers and musicians — Trier wisely stays away from the inside of his characters’ heads or the assumption of some omniscient creative interiority. Rather, he’s concerned with that other familiar of all creative types: Everything Else. Especially for an artist, so much of the process of maturity involves accepting the rest of the world; the dream of being a pure, untouched conduit for the muse, of reading and writing and living the life of the mind, is always woefully compromised by Everything Else. The story of those outside forces that mold boys into men when they’re not looking keeps “Reprise” from becoming an exercise in navel-staring. Every sensitive young man’s inner life is the most important thing in the world to him, but the universe is at work on us all. The film is good-natured and accessible for just this reason: Trier wants us feel as much affection and empathy for these people as he does.

He does a lovely job of capturing that age of impressionability salted with cynicism — how one can be so wide-eyed and still know enough to laugh about it or risk becoming endlessly self-important. Phillip and Erik idolize the reclusive author Sten Egil Dahl, sneaking photos of him walking his dog (and leaving the lens cap on) but walking away tongue-tied and embarrassed when they actually meet him at a book signing. They want to talk philosophy and they want to throw wild parties, read great literature and slam to their friends’ punk bands. Much of the music played by the fictional band Kommune was written for the movie, and the soundtrack is raucous and affable. The writers have tapped into a global and somewhat timeless punk rock aesthetic that works wonderfully.

The band members, little brothers, and hangers-on that make up Phillip and Erik’s circle of friends are equally well-picked. The combination of ridicule, competition and affection that ricochets between them is familiar, and it keeps the tone light even as Phillip fights the ongoing battle with his demons. Here, too, Trier steers away from any pathological take on mental illness and instead gives us Phillip’s friends’ awkwardness, his girlfriend’s desolation, Erik’s concern coupled with a lifetime of competition between the two that he can’t reflexively shrug off.

There are also, of course, the women in their lives. The relationships are sweet and immature at the same time, admittedly the love affairs of young, self-centered men who are looking for the muse in one incarnation or another. Trier owns up to as much, but doesn’t flinch away. Phillip is obsessed with returning to the first days of his relationship with the sweet and long-suffering Kari (Victoria Winge) in an effort to get back to a time when things were simpler for them. Erik decides his girlfriend Lillianne is an obstacle to his literary life, and skulks around behaving badly until she finally breaks up with him — in fact, she isn’t even seen in full frame, as a complete person, until then. Johanne (Rebekka Karijord), a publisher’s assistant, serves as the boys’ bridge to the world of grownups, even though she’s essentially as childish as they are. (Aside from Kari’s work as a telemarketer, Johanne seems to be the only character that has an actual job — the real-life concerns of earning a living aren’t part of this particular movie.) A sure sign that this story is really about very young men is that the best-realized characters, in walk-on roles, are their mothers.

Trier’s film hits all the right universal notes, not only the coming-of-age aspect but the nod to the early 21st-century Europe that sees itself as being all places at once. I had no problem relating to a couple of boys half my age — the leverage of the exterior world comes and goes, but the artist’s engagement with it never really ends. I particularly liked the story of Porno Lars, one of their gang destined to be forever ribbed for begging off an evening of TV to read his new volume of Heidegger, when an issue of Hustler is clearly visible through his grocery bag. I have a volume of Heidegger on my bedside table too. My intellectual intentions are as pure as Porno Lars’; mine have fallen victim not to wanking but its middle-aged version, the inability to read more than a couple of pages before falling asleep.

In the end, the misogynist trash-talking Lars falls victim to Everything Else as well. “Reprise” ends with the #1 universal trope of entrance into the adult world: a wedding. (Universal trope #2, the punk rocker turned ad writer, is taken care of earlier in the movie — another blessing of the nonlinear time line.) Erik’s trajectory as a working writer echoes his original jittery grandiose fantasies, but on a smaller, less glamorous scale. A jarring auto accident halfway through the film reminds us that disaster strikes out of nowhere — not when we will it, not when Phillip courts fate by counting down from ten as he bicycles along the street, eyes tight shut — but the movie ends on a gentle note, all of us able to presume that all these nice young men and women have futures.

Trier is also a nice young man with a future. His filmmaking is fast and modern, with nods to the French New Wave and MTV — he started out as a teen making skater videos. He is clearly adept and determined to use everything he’s learned along the way. But just as Phillip and Erik have enough self-awareness to laugh at themselves, and just as a nameless older-and-wiser narrator periodically steps in as the voice of reason, so Trier manages to pull back from the level of slickness that would consign “Reprise” to being nothing more than a youth film. It is a youth film, but it has a sweetness and affection for that youth that I found contagious. One wishes good lives, loud music and ready access to the muse all around.

—Lisa Peet is a writer living in NYC. She is currently reading Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

Comments

[lynn c]

Thanks Lisa. I really want to see this, now.

[Kat Warren]

As do I. Sounds sooo good.

[Renee]

Me three. Nice review, Lisa.

[Pat_D]

Engaging, well-crafted review, O. It sent me right to Netflix. Thanks.