Reprise (2006)
Directed by Joachim Trier
Fueled by literary aspirations and youthful exuberance, two competitive friends endure the pangs of love, depression, and burgeoning careers.
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This festival (Best Director, Karlovy Vary; Discovery Award, Toronto) and Norwegian film awards winner owes more than a nod to Tom Tykwer's fate-bending fairy tale, "Run Lola Run," with its narrated 'what if' and flight of fancy' scenarios which continually spin off the main action.
While borrowing repeatedly from the best of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Le Fabuleux Destin d'Am�(c)lie Poulain") and the Germanic Tom Tykwer ("Run, Lola, Run"), Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier has nevertheless fashioned a most promising first feature with the art house "Reprise."
Broadly, this is a coming-of-age movie in the Diner mold: Trier tracks Phillip and Erik and a few of their pals as they stagger into a world that can’t be attuned to their (male adolescent) expectationsespecially in regard to women.
Slightly less cinematically obsessive viewers, however, might see this as a fairly arty, literary, more sensitive punk rock take on “Diner” and possibly even “ Swingers ,” with a generous de-heroined dash of “Trainspotting” and a gimmick or two on loan from “ Run, Lola, Run .”
"His gaze made her feel pretty," intones the narrator, in a voice of bruised longing reminiscent of French New Wave films like "Jules and Jim."
A coming-of-age tale featuring an interconnected, if not incestuous group of young, creative people trying to make their mark, the film will remind arthouse veterans of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” a 1953 semi-autobiographical, archetypal, young-male-coming-of-age film about a half-dozen developmentally arrested, small-town Italian layabouts in search of adulthood.
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One sequence suggests a mini-“Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
The directorial debut of Joachim Trier, Reprise takes from influences as loftly as Last Year at Marienbad and as populist as Trainspotting, all the while hinting at other great European cultural influences in the worlds of literature, film and post-punk music.
This stylish, often-frenetic first feature from Norweigan filmmaker Trier (distant cousin to that Danish master of discomfort Lars von Trier) is as auspicious � and breathless � a debut as Reservoir Dogs was for Tarantino; and just as with our American motormouth savant, one senses that Trier has always been the coolest kid in the room � at least in any room that counts.
David Edelstein reviewed Lars von Trier's Dogville , and Dana Stevens reviewed his Manderlay .
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David Edelstein reviewed Lars von Trier's Dogville , and Dana Stevens reviewed his Manderlay .