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I was particularly eager to view Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” again with an audience, as it is a splendid mashup of fiction, essays, and cinema, which took critical thinking by the storm through its bold and confident execution, novelistic style, and marvelous constructs. At the same time, the movie enhances the viewers experience through its unique approach to storytelling.
On Saturday afternoon, I remember my friend, who is only a few years older than the 23 year olds in the movie, claiming that he had attended Landmark Century with a shocking amount of sixty people on a weekend. He has a background in music and literature and is seamlessly ensnared in the world of women, which might suggest a core focus of the film ‘Reprise’. It wasn’t until later that I found out that The Reader had not reviewed the film at all, which is puzzling because I recall them producing a documentary that takes a stance on other filmmakers’ work, which is quite a common issue for independent filmmakers. After reading Ebert’s two-star review I wish I wouldn’t have read, because it reminds me too much of Ebert’s stare at Kiarostami where he scribed one star for “Taste of Cherry.” It’s quite possible that this form of writing is more loving then it might come across, and for now I will choose the comfort and solace of “Reprise.”
I used to wonder what other people thought of the movie until I heard my friends’ reactions. If my Norwegian movie from 2006 is something, I am truly ahead of my time. (“Sex and the City,” is a perfect example of that, but I averted my gaze). “Reprise” which I wrote about last week, is a smart but never patronizing work of art that captures beauty, sorrow, humor, and sublime elegance set in the backdrop of energetic cinemas. The fact that it barely ever saw the screens in the United States is a depressing indication of the state of American film buff. Last week, Trier and I discussed some of the movie’s remarkable features such as the incorporation of Alain Resnais’ masterpiece, “Last Year at Marienbad,” which was played at the Music Box. I tell Trier, “This movie is such a bundle of energy, a burst of exuberance.” Trier replies, “Thanks! Yeah, we’ve kind of looked at it as a bit of a scrapbook film.” The 34-year-old writer and director continued, “It is a scrapbook film for me, as it assumes a free-form style where one would like to indulge in chaos or random diatribes on what the character could possibly feel at a certain age whenever it came to love.”
“Reprise” is freedom, digression, and self contradiction. It is a consciousness that has been built upon its characters and their subconscious, like a good novel does.
“My writer Eskil Vogt, and I are both keen on that line of thought. There exists this notion and it’s preposterous that cinema has no way of depicting thought. I believe that’s slightly odd. There are certainly measures attempting to depict associative or thought patterns in films. It’s just something that we find entertaining to expand on. As for ‘Reprise,’ I reckon we’ve, in some way, tried to show that everything we want to imagine at times, wish for, or have regretted not being able to speak at the moment, all amalgamate into one and take the form of a number of actions that we tend to engage in. That was something we were exploring.”
There’s a scene that stands out for me, particularly when the first published writer is on the street with a woman and the narrator remembers her as the single individual with The Ramones on vinyl, at which point he is run over by a vehicle.
Simultaneously operating are three distinct layers of cognition, one of which is, ‘I am not paying attention; instead I am listening to her and contemplating her valance, and hence I am poised to step onto the road. yes, that is accurate,” Trier agrees. “There are several layers. One of my pet dislikes is the casual device that one likes to throw at a multi-perspective understanding of things. I think a good proportion of this was trying to use devices, which in my case means capturing the audience in such a mock-contrived way to storytelling, and god knows what else is being done to suppress our voices over, but I hope it is taken into consideration. But I certainly hope that they had tried to accomplish something more than simple narration, rather a complex informed something in relation to a non-participating third person, which I guess speaks with a faint growl or something, which is almost as if people are thinking back at other moments while they are talking to each other. For example [the couple] in the café, they converse about some events in the past, they are walking in the park which we gradually are able to understand, the park is the present too, we are not quite sure what was said but I think we can guess their reality.”
But he says, too, that “Andrei Tarkovsky is a big inspiration,” Trier admires Resnais but adds ‘why not’ too.
In the book ‘Sculpting in Time,’ the author speaks of realism in such a way that it feels as though you are walking down a street and you spot a man. If you try to recreate that framed accurately in your mind, placing the camera your eyes were would mean putting it in that position and filming a man that looks like the man and you will capture nothing. What you are perceiving is someone’s thought process. You have potentially ‘seen’ a person with a likeness to an uncle or an old friend you happened to lose a fight with your girlfriend that so frustrated you that as you looked upon him, you were already feeling down. I mean, there are millions of other moments that are present in that moment. To contextualize and make those connections is as important, if not more important, than what is actually viewed.”
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