SFIFF50 Posting #1
April 30th, 2007They won’t all be numbered but so far I’ve faced a number of needlessly daunting limitations and the sense that I’m finally exceeding my limitations is something I want to make some kind of psychological note of. Hence “#1.”
I’ve decided to write about the films I see that haven’t been assigned to me by Boxoffice.com - my publication locale of date. I’m really looking forward to that arrangement. The people at Box Office have been great!
So, about Reprise
Reprise is a film from Norway that could have a really strong cultural draw internationally but with American distribution the deck is stacked against it. It’s a shame because the film is really clever, young and insightful, Reprise employs just the right kind of meta. The film is something of a coming of age film but the bildungsroman is happening to 23-year-olds.
About two friends who have similar fantasies of becoming successful novelists, we meet Erik and Phillip as they mail off their first manuscripts. From there we see their futures, which, like their books, are infinitely revisable. Their realities don’t vary wildly from their fantasies however the sort of glossing over that happens in their future stories carries with a romantic veneer that isn’t shared by the lives they live.
Debut feature by director Joachim Trier, the film takes from hefty influences, referencing Last Year at Marienbad (coincidentally, Resnais’ newest is playing this fest too) and hinting at other great European cultural influences in the worlds of literature, film and post-punk music. Intelligently, the protagonists are young men (almost post-kids) on the precipice of being “adults” – a condition they ridicule incessantly. When Phillip’s novel is published, he suffers a mental breakdown and is committed. Mental illness is a condition that plagues the writers in the film: they struggle with it as they struggle with their novels. Eventually the old boy’s club they’ve created, the one that’s ironically hostile to girls, can’t be held onto if the boys are to cross over to their healthier, more successful, adulthoods. And this shines a funny, messy, edgy light onto the zeitgeist that inspired their works to begin with. It’s all quite imperfect but it’s also rather glamorous. To see inspiration with nostalgia at the age of 24 somehow seems quite familiar and decidedly bittersweet.
Again, this could be HUGE internationally if America magically developed a tolerance to subtitles. In my fantasies I concoct clever websites for films like Reprise, in which I tell the cyber-world the film could be their youth-angst salvations: their new Trainspotting, their new Quadrophenia, their new (dare I write it) Breathless. But alas. All I’ve got’s this blog.