BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—From the opening credits of the artful foreign film Reprise, I knew instantly that I was in for a unique movie-going experience.
The edgy film focuses on two young writers and skillfully constructs a collage of sounds and images, painting a portrait of a group of friends in their 20s in Oslo, Norway. What makes the story unique is its fluid layering of splayed and splintered timelines, weaving in and out of past and futures—projected, imagined, and lived. In its construction, it raises question about how much one determines, discovers, influences, or intuits one's life course.
Following the screening, I had the opportunity to meet the director and co-writer of Reprise. Tall, fair-skinned, and disarmingly affable, Joachim Trier was just off the plane from New York when I met him at an informal gathering in Beverly Hills on May 7. He was quite open to speaking about the film immediately after the viewing, even as my mind was still digesting this richly textured feast of a movie.
Reprise also explores themes of friendships between young men, their relationships to women, inspiration, and psyches where we share spaces and where we can't. The film, though not autobiographical for Trier or his writing partner, Eskil Vogt, is personal and based on a composite of people they knew growing up.
"The main characters of Phillip and Erik are not Eskil and myself, but based on many people we have known growing up—creative people who all had these great opportunities and expectations in their twenties and found themselves looking back wistfully at the dreams they weren't able to fulfill," explains Trier. "So the film is not directly about us, but emerges perhaps from a kind of nostalgia for these characters who we know so well and care about the same things we care about—music, literature, dreams, friendship, memory, and identity."
The film's impressive cast is as atypical as its structure. Trier was intent on finding someone with an unfamiliar face and wide acting range. After an extensive search with over 1,000 auditions, he chose Anders Danielsen Lie—a former child actor, musician, and doctor—for the role of Phillip. For Erik, he chose Espen Klouman-Hoiner, an advertising copywriter who has also done television and film productions.
There are many elements that came together to create this complex film, including unpretentiously beautiful shots, well-developed characters, intelligent dialogue, and superb acting.
The innovative use of sound deserves note as well. Exuberant music juxtaposed to the absence of all sound reflects youthful expression and mood. Trier said that as the son of a sound engineer, he grew up with a sensitivity and awareness of the importance of sound in filmmaking, not as an afterthought in the editing stages but as a crucial element in the film's foundation.
As the name Reprise suggests, I am eager to see this film again—and anything else Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt do for that matter.
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