When Sudden Success Attacks

Movies | Review of: Reprise

By NICOLAS RAPOLD
May 16, 2008

Now let us import sad young literary men: "Reprise," the debut feature by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, traces the divergent paths of two 20-something friends and writers in Oslo. Recasting the theme of camaraderie and performance anxiety from last spring's "Poison Friends" and its French university students, "Reprise" skitters with a heady, hit-the-ground-running style that cools off with the fading of its characters' illusions and energies.

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Mr. Trier shoots for a youthful touchstone — à la "Jules and Jim" in the 1960s or "Trainspotting" in the '90s — embroidering his film with punk and post-punk music, a cool, ad-influenced palette, and a chronicling voice-over. And since it's the director's first film (written with Eskil Vogt), the two main characters must hit close to home: Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) are aspiring authors who are introduced to us as they entrust their manuscript submissions to the same mailbox.

Success comes like a brick to the head for Phillip, who dissipates, dazed, into a deep depression that is aggravated by romantic obsession (and accentuated by Mr. Lie's hooded eyes and shaved head). Freshly handsome Erik, too, gets published eventually, but the shuffling switchbacks of the storytelling portray the professional arcs as equal by way of hang-out scenes with their circle of friends from earlier, more carefree days.

Phillip and Erik are tied together by their literary pretensions, with the latter idolizing a reclusive older writer. Both are also on the cusp of outgrowing the bickering friends from the (rather prim-looking) punk scene that helped define them. One of those buddies insults a colleague of Erik's editor; another has been domesticated into a prematrimonial world of "TV series and nice dinners," earning his share of scoffs.

Phillip's mental dip, rendered quite credibly by Mr. Lie, tinges portions of "Reprise" with a gloom that offsets the film's stretches of fluttery exuberance. His brief stint in an institution cuts short his relationship with Kari (the Norwegian model Viktoria Winge), who is left bewildered and wounded. He persuades her to repeat an idyllic trip to Paris they once took together, literally replicating particular moments, as if the solace of artistic control could be applied to life.

While Phillip short-circuits in the face of getting what he wants, Erik remains intact but is no more ready for prime time (as is literally shown by a mordantly funny television appearance in which foot is swiftly and surely placed in mouth). His obsession is the novelist Sten Egil Dahl (Sigmund Sæverud), a somewhat stock figure of experience who, giving Erik advice, yields one of the film's few false, wish-fulfilling moments (in a movie that already features Erik's pre-success girlfriend hurling the ultimate insult: "You're such a cliché!").

Like its characters, the movie has some trouble staying one step ahead, pulling everything together, and keeping mindful of the women. Mr. Klouman-Høiner also has a habit of leaning on a broad, rueful smile to convey innocence, and Erik remains a bit of a foil to Phillip. Everyone is filmed with a glow that, especially given the striking Nordic faces on display, can make incidental standing-around scenes look like shots for album publicity.

Ultimately, Mr. Trier lets "Reprise" get away from him, but he seems a little too enamored of his narrator the whole time. The device unnecessarily hammers home the self-dramatizing and racing conjectures of its characters, and tilts the movie away from experiencing the characters firsthand in favor of the quotation marks of rumination. But this sort of milieu, with its ready appeal to young critics, could be a lot worse (and it surely misses a little something in the translation from Norwegian, not least the nature of the young scribes' work). Mr. Trier's handling of disparate tones is worth keeping an eye out for, in whatever his sure-to-be-agonized-over sophomore effort turns out to be.