Pride Unprejudiced: Reprise

That such a vivid, bravura, gorgeous, funny, sad, beautiful, smart (but never smug) display of cinematic fireworks as Reprise almost didn't hit screens here is a terrible, terrible sign of what's become of the once-functional arthouse scene. Norwegian director Joachim Trier's debut feature has been on the festival circuit for a while, and U.S. distribution has come largely because of collaboration by Miramax and Netflix's Red Envelope at the behest of producer Scott Rudin's support.

The dazzling opening minutes, in black-and-white, accompanied by George Delerue's main theme from Truffaut's Jules and Jim, have a narcotic energy, sending up while celebrating the French New Wave, delineating several potential futures that could branch out from a single moment: Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Hoiner), two friends in their early 20s, stand in front of a post box, each ready to drop the manuscript of their first novel into the mail, into the culture, into the lives of others. To simply describe all the dazzlingly realized moments in this cinematic powerhouse would be easy; Reprise both flickers and teems with life. In conversation, Trier is unabashed in his enthusiasm for film history and cultural cross-reference. (As a teen he was a Norwegian national skateboard champion and music is an important influence.) This Norwegian movie from 2006 is more here-and-now than any movie I could see this week. (Sex and The City will likely be such an instance of not-here not-now.)

Here's Trier's apt summary from press notes: "What I wanted to do was depict a very specific cultural environment, with characters that I know intimately. I wanted to make a film about friendships and aspirations that fail. I wanted to make a film that was as full of contrasts in its form as the lives of the characters. I wanted to use a cinematic language that reflected the narrative culture of a gang of 23-year-old men, full of anecdotes and digressions, searching and open, but with pain and disappointment lying just below the surface. What is intended to be different about 'Reprise' is the use of contrasts and contradictions in the material, the mixture of humor and seriousness. Reprise should seem as rich in ideas as young men of that age are."

Musical selections from Le Tigre to New Order to Paul Weller are sure and apt, and a pivotal apocryphal punk band called Kommune, with a hit called "Fingerfucked by the Prime Minister," bears an eye-opening yowl. Lapidary and luscious, heartfelt and heartbreaking, restless yet studied, footloose yet impassioned, Reprise is a movie I love. In this interview from May 9, 2008, Trier talks about showing thought in movies; verbal storytelling; the influence of Henry James, Alain Resnais and Tarkovsky; making mistakes; cinematic space; the homogenizing (but sometimes hopeful) aspects of the internet and why mental illness should not be romanticized.

RAY PRIDE: This movie is such a bundle of energy, a burst of exuberance.

JOACHIM TRIER: [laughs] Thanks! Yeah, we've kind of looked at it as a bit of scrapbook film. We didn't want to restrict ourselves too much, we wanted there to be chaos and digressions and allowed ourselves to do this because of the age of the characters and their types.

RP: After seeing the film, I'm thinking about it, making notes on my laptop, looking at pieces filed from festivals, revisiting some clips on the Norwegian Film Institute website, I realize I'm in the swim of the film in a dozen different ways. It was a subjective parallel to all the devices of the film itself. Although I know the film made its first appearances in 2006, it still captures that present tension; I'd even say it moves at "the speed of thought." The film is thinking and digressing and contradicting itself.

JT: Yeah, that's something that both me and my co-writer [Eskil Vogt] are very interested in exploring. This idea, which is a ridiculous idea, that you can't show thought in cinema: I think it's [a] rather weird approach. Certainly there are ways of trying to show associative, or associations of thought patterns in film. It's something that we just find fun to explore. With Reprise, I think we've gone the furthest in a way, trying to show that what we imagine, or what we wish for, or what we wish we should have said, or that thing that keeps nagging us from the past, all of that is part of several of the moments we are in. We were trying to play around with that. I think the film has several modes of expression in it, and I dunno, I think this is something we've also explored in our short films that we've written together.

RP: Can you describe what you mean by the modes of expression?

JT: You mean like the structural, the way we work with time layering, for example, and the off voice [narration], stuff like that?

RP: Yeah. There's a sequence that's emblematic for me, when the writer who's published first is walking down the street with a woman and the voice-over observes, "she was the only person he ever knew who had the Ramones on vinyl and then he gets hit by a car." Three different layers of cognition going on there, and one of them is, I'm not paying attention, I'm listening to her and looking at her and thinking about her vinyl, so I'm going to walk out in traffic.

TRIER: Yeah, yeah, true. There are several layers. We like to have sort of a [multiple] perspective on things without being too pretentious about it. I guess a lot of this was trying to use devices—I hate "device," because it sounds like a mock-contrived approach to storytelling, and hopefully our voiceover is quite integral to what's going on—but we certainly wanted to have a multilayered, a multi-faceted approach to this, in terms of having a narration, third person, almost authorial voice, going on. And also at the same time using off-voice, which is closer to thought in a way, almost as if people are thinking back at other moments wile they are talking to each other. For instance, [the couple] in the café, they speak about the past, they walk in the park, suddenly we understand the park is in the present as well, we're not quite sure what was said, but hopefully we get a sense of their reality. Andrei Tarkovsky is a big inspiration, the way that he describes in his book, "Sculpting in Time," his approach to reality is as if you walk down a street and see a man, and you try to re-create that, thinking of reality as an objective truth and put the camera where your eyes [were], you film a man, an actor that looks like the man, you will capture nothing. Because what you have seen is your own thought process. You've seen that the man might have resembled your uncle or an old friend, you might have had a fight with your girlfriend that made you sad as you looked at him. I mean, there are millions of other moments present in that moment. To try to make those connections and contextualizing things is just as important as what is actually seen. That might have sounded a bit like an abstract thought there, but I hope you know what I mean! [laughs]

RP: Yes, I do. The process of thought plays through too, in the film's willingness to be abrupt, to go back-and-forth, and to turn from one thing to another so rapidly. Changing the tenses of what's unfolded. It's kind of like a grammar of thought.

JT: Great. I think there's something interesting also in verbal storytelling I think that we are inspired by. A lot of the film's stories are almost little anecdotes told by the characters sometimes. It's sort of insinuated… They're a bunch of guys that tell each other little stories, digressions all the time. When we tell something verbally, we always jump around in time. We talk about that guy we met yesterday but actually he is going tomorrow somewhere else and we remember meeting him first two years ago. Within two sentences, you've described three tenses of time in a way. I think film can be a more like that, without necessarily being alienating to people, I think it can be an including in working with the film grammar, film language, hopefully.

RP: It's auspicious that the right people are pushing Reprise into the U.S. film distribution system, like Mr. Rudin. If there's any arthouse audience left in this country, you'd hope they'd spark to something about intelligent people, about youth, that strikes all these chords.

TRIER: I'm glad you say that. It makes me hopeful for the release, you know. It certainly helps that Scott Rudin and Miramax are behind it and support it. So far, we've had some good critical response as well, so fingers crossed, it'll transcend some of those preconceptions sometimes people also have about foreign language films. You and I know that's not always the case, but sometimes people think it's a costume drama, or very small and otherworldly, something which one can't identify with. With Reprise, we consciously wanted to bridge a gap that I think a lot of young people feel with more arthouse kind of films, in terms of the punk music references and the general cultural references to be relevant to the present day.

RP: And music's kind of unmoored from timelines in contemporary culture, whether it's a song by Joy Division or the Jam or Le Tigre, all of which you have on the soundtrack. I know a 22-year-old skateboarder with the most eclectic taste, including listening to Le Tigre—

JT: Exactly! This is the funny thing. Things have changed. There's not this one paradigm, and then the next one, it's not so easy anymore. Which is fun. When we started writing Reprise, me and my co-writer, we were in a situation where the whole post-punk thing hadn't been revived yet. When that was happening, and I was living in London, and I remembered first hearing Franz Ferdinand, thinking, "My goodness! What's happening?" [chuckles] There were all of these bands coming out. Now that's become more mainstream. Which again, while over the period of two years Reprise has been released various places, in 30 countries or something, it's been going along with that whole music hype. So it's now suddenly something that's not so marginal to young people, it's more mainstream that it was when the film was first conceived, which is kind of funny.

RP: It's commonly noted that film unwinds in the present tense. It's a persistent now. What's strange about pop culture in general today, with increased accessibility on the internet, is all kinds of music can exist in these little tribal passages. Five people discover a song in Chicago, three people in Oslo—

JT: Yeah, yeah—

RP: And suddenly 2,000 people around the world are listening to this one song that had been forgotten.

JT: It's a paradox. I'm curious about it, because in one way, the internet sometimes disappoints me in its tendency to homogenize. But on the other side, there's that hopefulness, an optimism that you're speaking about, which is about little things existing many, many places. Little marginal cultural expressions being discovered by small groups in many places around the world. That's fascinating, certainly. I grew up going to London, y'know, saving up my money to go to Rough Trade record store in Notting Hill and buying that one vinyl I'd been looking for two years and really cherishing that! [laughs] Certainly things have changed, y'know. It's so easy to get hold of stuff now. I just hope that there are, with a lack of any editorial control, I mean it's really up to the music critics and bloggers to try to convey also a sense of development in musical history. And also with film. I think it's incredibly important that people have a sense of development. Not just in terms of what is the hype right now, but seeing things in the historical context, things that you discover that are more interesting on the path as well.

RP: It's really unpredictable how people react to things anymore - that is, the circle of people I know who are younger. I went to see a new 35mm print of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad with a friend in her 20s, and I thought she'd find it oppressive. While watching it, it seemed like she was bored silly, I worried about the insistent organ score, but I found out later she was immediately linking that to an Icelandic all-organ quartet, Apparat Organ Quartet. She brought her own context with her. She'd left during a key part, and I had no idea; it turned out she was having her period—

JT: [laughs] Are you serious?

RP: —Yeah, and she missed certain parts that I explained to her, and she'd figured it out, she got the rhyming, associative parts without the film context I would have put atop it. Lots of distraction and yet still evocative.

JT: Oh goodness. That's fascinating. Last Year at Marienbad is certainly one of my old favorites. That's punk to me, in a way. That's really, that's taking chances, breaking up language, it's even alienating. It's noisy, the dissonant organ music going on. It's at some point even comical, I think. I know Alain Robbe-Grillet described it at some point almost as a comedy. It certainly challenges your projection on cinematic representation of time and memory. And what's more fun than that? Last Year at Marienbad. Alain Resnais is one of the last survivors. We've lost Bergman and Antonioni, so…

RP: He's still shooting.

JT: Absolutely! Chris Marker's just done his exhibition in, what's it called, this virtual reality, Second Life? You can go and see where he's mixed with his cat, he's animated a version of himself, he doesn't like to be seen.

RP: There are people who decide to remain young.

JT: Yeah. Unfortunately, it's not possible. But you can remain young in spirit and in your creativity.

RP: I like how the punk band, Kommune, figures into the threads of the story. When you see them introducing their hit, "Fingerfucked by the Prime Minister," while I see the Joy Division visual likeness, the singer's also kind of like a friend of mine, he's got a band called Joan of Arc—

JT: [chuckles]

RP: — My own free-association at that scene, my friend's always straining his voice, but he's a brilliant lyricist, who as a teenager, did a yowling punk version of A-Ha's "Take On Me."

JT: No!

RP: Yes! A punk version of that.

JT: Do you have that on an MP3? Would you mind sending that to me? Oh please. That would be… so cool! That's just fascinating, man.

RP: The 15-year-old doesn't understand that the original isn't so insanely heartfelt. It's meant to be bubblegum but it's something torn from his heart.

JT: Fascinating…

RP: You brought up Antonioni. You have a real sense of space and urban location that I like. I hate to see films set in a city and the director doesn't have the instinct even to simply point the camera out the window.

JT: I’m interested in spatial treatment, very much, and I knew that Reprise [would explore that], because of the nature of [the script's] dialogue, there is a lot of dialogue, there's a lot of people avoiding conflict, and then talking about other things always, while avoiding what's really going on in those relationships. So I knew it would also be a film that needed a lot of close-ups. And I worked very closely with my cinematographer, Jakob Ihre, really trying to do interesting close-ups and not just go for dimensional ones, to use close-ups expressively and let them be spatial shots as well. To try to open up, to use a lot of headspace. You're right...inspired by… everything! From John Singer Sargent paintings, to Cartier-Bresson portraiture photography. I mean, really, for this one, it was a study in close-ups as well. Because it's a lot of interiors, but having said that, it also ahs the ambition to try to show Oslo differently. The strange thing about having lived away, for seven years in London, is I found coming back to Oslo, it, it changed making a film in that city, it changed my view on it. It's all we hope for when we do something: that it will change our approach to reality, that it'll affect us as we try to portray it.

RP: Going back to the small things with large influence idea, I think it was Lou Reed who said of the first Velvets album, only 40,000 people bought it but every one of them started a band.

JT: Ah, it's true. I think Jello Biafra made that point in a documentary I saw as well, that those people who ended up in punk bands all across America had bought The Stooges and Velvet Underground. It's true. One thing changes something into another.

RP: Beyond the formal ideas we've talked about, it's impressive how you treat mental illness. With Philip's breakdowns that begin quickly after the fantasies of their young ambitions, you address this fear among creative people, that burning inspiration can be just a step away from cracking up. What makes one unique or one's friends fascinating could also be on the borderline of mental illness. This is a dark and sincere fear that lingers under any group of intelligent, creative friends, especially in those immediate post-collegiate years. That woman you think is so fascinating, one day she's something under her breath, you realize, she's going to go mad like her mother.

JT: I think there's the, how should I say this? The pseudo-madness of young, creative people. And then there's the sad, unromanticized, real schizophrenia that we try to describe in the film that has a… We try to turn a cliché of the mad artist around a bit. It's truly a sad thing. Me and my co-writer have a very good friend in Oslo that has suffered from schizophrenic disorder, I think you say in English. It means you're bipolar, depression, schizophrenia. He's been schizophrenic a few times through his twenties and on heavy medication. It's made it impossible for him to be as creative as he is. So the terrible thing, it's nothing to subscribe to as an ideal at all. It's more the opposite. We were interested in that. We were also interested in how difficult it is to sustain a friendship dynamic when the passion you share is suddenly gone. There's no point in any kind of romanticizing of Philip as a bit special, and transgressively thinking person, because ultimately, as you're pointing out, that also leads to tragedy.

RP: There's the poseur with Antonin Artaud in their hip pocket, but then there's acting out, as some people get to on stage as actors or musicians. Then the quirky person we know who over the course of time becomes less stable, that's not often addressed in movies. Great expectations don't always work out well.

JT: No. And great expectations, they certainly are a theme in Reprise, the inability to live up to your own great expectations. That's a tragedy of many middle-classed lives I've seen. All that freedom, all the privilege. I've mentioned this a couple of times, actually it's funny, but it's Henry James, a completely different tradition of storytelling than the French new wave, Henry James [who's thanked in the end credits] has just been very inspiring to us, particularly in "The Lesson of the Master" and "The Beast in the Jungle," these stories of people with great potential, by their own intelligence and self-reflection, make it almost impossible to achieve anything in life. It makes them completely impotent as people.

RP: James has that cascading introspection to his prose, too.

JT: It's really interesting. I read somewhere that Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, two other references [in Reprise], were both big fans of Henry James. Which is so strange. In cinema, I often feel this dichotomy: I have big problems with storytelling. Everyone says, "Oh film is about telling great stories." And I'm thinking, hmm, ultimately there should be something more. There should be mood, pace, theme, abstraction. All those things. Even in a very realistic film, all those things come into play. In literature as well, I'm very interested in the more poetic tradition of prose. But really, there's something about Henry James, his ability to both a great storyteller and be thematically incredibly sophisticated and not make simple resolution in his characters' lives. That's also very inspiring.

RP: There's a scene in the film that reminds me of, where Lars, one of the buddies, is a party, being provocative by saying women don’t show men new music or new literature, they're just interested in bourgeois lives with dinner parties. They make men dull. Then you have Erik thinking to himself should he break up with his girlfriend, and you withhold our perspective of her, you break her up into pieces, we see the back of her head, her feet—

JT: You don't see her face—

RP: You don't see her as a whole person while Erik is trying to cut her off. It's an emotional way of conveying his perspective there.

JT: Yeah. I think it works like that, but also just on a very simple level, almost a childish device to say, yeah, as you say, he doesn't see her, she's almost not a part of the story of his life. So we won't show her until she breaks into the film herself at the end, when she [announces] doesn’t want to be part of [his selfish life anymore]. I think you always get advice against… Let's put it another way. We wanted to do some extreme things, childish ideas as well. I think it's good to be playful with cinema. It's so easy to be intimidated by the machinery and everyone saying, "Oh you've got to make this for everyone, make sure everyone understands everything." I don't know anyone, any of my friends who played in bands that would ever think like that. You would do what you thought was cool, and you'd be a bit nervous, would people like it, if they'd care. But you certainly wouldn't say, "Um, that was a note I don’t think people will think is catchy, so let's change it." It's a strange attitude that's easy to forget it's because of the [complexities] of the financial situation of making a movie. In terms of that, I think I was very fortunate in having a bunch of really close friends around, my DP, my editor, my co-writer, a lot of people. My production designer, they're all very good friends of mine. We support each other almost by principle when it comes to trying out things.

RP: That's sort of like the complex with digital filmmaking and digital photography, when someone asks, don't you want to shoot on film? And you say sure, that would be great, but it is possible to forge an esthetic with what you have at hand, to learn how to embellish your mistakes into style more quickly. In Reprise, there are a couple of nice moments where you don't correct for fluorescent lighting, and you get a flicker effect.

JT: Yeah, we have purposeful flicker, particularly when he walks up to his girlfriend['s apartment], which is a mistake that I love. It's almost like you can feel time, you can see it, you're slower than the light, y'know. [laughs]

RP: In quotation marks, that's wrong, that's a mistake—

JT: It's like [lens] flares. You couldn’t use flares 30 years ago. It would be a mistake. You would get fired for flares.

RP: I think musicians and photographers have more opportunities than filmmakers to go, oh, that’s a useful mistake, to turn it into a signature.

JT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny. If you see Chris Cunningham using certain digital pixilation mistakes actively in his music videos for Aphex Twin, for example, and I thought, okay, that's the next generation, now we'll have people messing around with digital faults. I'm sure there's undiscovered mistakes to be used in an esthetically interesting way. I agree with you. Listen, feedback at a Jimi Hendrix concert? In music, it's so old now.