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Reprise takes on writers from Oslo with mixed results

The best way to describe Joachim Trier’s Reprise is that it is not a solidly anchored narrative.  It is a film about writing, which is weird because we rarely see anyone actually writing.  It is more about the idea of writing and how the processes affects and effects two young men.

Set in Oslo, the film is crafted more along the lines of a filmed novel in progress.  We open with two young writers, Phillip and Erik, standing in front of a post box, manuscripts in hand.  According to the narrator, they are both to mail off their works.  But then our narrator has a change about their success and changes the story.  He crafts their initial meeting before our eyes, changing it from different times and places.  We vision his revisions. 

Our narrator decides that Phillip is published first.  His book is hailed as a modern masterpiece and fame comes hard and fast.  He meets not a girl but The Girl—Kari—the one who becomes his muse.  The single most effective scene in the entire movie is when they first meet, a countdown to locked eyes.  His obsessions over her drain his frail psyche.  The passion of their relationship fuels his demise.                                                                                                                                      Erik is convinced that he has no talent when his novel is rejected.  But, he does have some perseverance and trudges on.  They both have this giant group of male friends, one who is the younger brother of a near famous punk band.  The group has an underground hit along the lines of ‘God Save the Queen’ but ruder.  The group is more fuel for their literary fires.

Of the two male leads Espen Klouman Hoiner and Anders Danielson Lie are both adequate but neither comes across as a writer.  They do all the cliché steps of being a tortured soul, but they don’t actually seem to get any pen to paper.  But young Viktoria Winge has that intangible quality that comes across the screen as captivating yet vunerable.  In her every scene, the camera pulls toward her like a charged magnet.  She is the find of the picture and one would hope we haven’t seen the last of her.

The mood set by director Joachim Trier is of thundering quiet.  He captures emotional condition better than a linear telling of the tale.  To describe Reprise in better terms, it would be like picking up a novel and only reading parts then trying to connect the exercise into a collective whole.  I found the entire exercise reeked more of pretension and phoniness than based in any semblance of reality. 

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