Reprise

Rating:

Seems like so many independent/arthouse movies these days absolutely revel in being “demanding.”   They demand that you find some significance in the slow pace, the lack of plot or characterization or dialogue.   They hold on a kitchen table scene for six seconds too long, they revel in scenes of characters doing pretty much nothing.    They call this realism, and mock you in your desire to see movies in which things happen.   As if an interesting conversation were equivalent to a car chase or an explosion: only Philistines demand such things in their movies.   

“Reprise” puts all those movies to shame.   Like them, it’s not really about much.   There are two main characters (Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Heiner)who write and want to be writers; there’s a circle of friends around them, some who embarass them, some who inspire them, and some that just seem to have nothing better to do.  Lie gets a novel published, and then has a mental breakdown.  A girl(Viktoria Winge) is involved, or gets blamed, or perhaps she’s just in the wrong place at the right time.   Klouman-Heiner cares about him, and struggles to strike the right balance between checking up on him and letting him live his own life.  They go to parties and punk rock shows, they meet their idol, they go on TV shows to promote their books, which nobody reads.  None of this really amounts to a plot.   It all happens pretty episodically.   Essentially, it’s a movie that follows a group of guys around for a few years, and hopes that you find them interesting.   

What sets “Reprise” apart is that it really does hope that you find them interesting; it never demands that they are interesting.   Director Joachim Trier’s filmmaking if full of energy and life; he is clearly a student of the French New Wave, though he’s able to bring the techniques of that movement to the screen without the nihilism or arrogance.    The result is that you do care about these two young men, and you don’t mind that nothing in “Reprise” really leads to any big climax or story arc.   Perhaps because the movie invites you to care, instead of demanding that you do so.