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The Oslo Trilogy: Three Films By Joachim Trier [Blu-ray]

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SNL alumnus and Portlandia co-creator Armisen is indie comedy royalty and also has a sideline in music (he’s currently bandleader on Late Night with Seth Meyers). Now he merges his twin loves in Comedy for Musicians But Everyone Is Welcome, which wrangles muso observations into crowd-pleasing gags. Rachel Aroesti

Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy” – Reprise (2006), Oslo, 31 August (2011) and The Worst Person in the World (2021) – wants to ask the big questions: What is a creative life, an intellectual life? What in art is authentic? Are the pursuit of art and the pursuit of love alike – full of suffering, frustration and disappointment? Is it possible to become an adult and to sustain an adolescent level of obsession with books, films and records? Is it possible to be a bit more sensible as an adult – fewer hangovers, less heartbreak when meeting girls and heroes – without becoming bourgeois? Above all, the trilogy is interested in the struggle to balance an intensity of feeling with the matter of everyday life. It begins with Reprise, a cinematic Künstlerroman in which two young men, Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner), aspire to be writers of serious literature, and it continues with Oslo, 31 August, a literary adaptation focused on a day, a long night and morning after in the life of a thirty-four-year-old man, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), temporarily out from an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre to interview for a role as editorial assistant at a publishing house. The trilogy finishes with The Worst Person in the World, an already beloved romantic comedy, reviewed warmly at its Cannes premiere and now nominated for two Oscars (Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay). Ostensibly influenced by George Cukor and Eric Rohmer, the film is to my mind more reminiscent of Sundance fare like 500 Days of Summer and Netflix’s Master of None. While it is the first film in the Oslo trilogy to centre the existential wandering not of a young man but of a young woman, The Worst Person is also the safest of the three. With Julie (Renate Reinsve), the trilogy finally grows up and gives up – not only on an intensity of feeling but also on the other stuff of life. The opening weekend of this year’s fest features UK premieres of two recent major works by Rebecca Saunders. The Oslo Sinfonietta introduces Skull, influenced by Haruki Murakami (18 Nov); while Ensemble Nikel and Noa Frenkel bring Us Dead Talk Love, setting texts by Ed Atkins (19 Nov). Andrew Clements in the digital streaming era. (For some, like myself, physical media will always be the preferred option for film viewings). st, and The Worst Person in the World. The collection is a must-own for fans of these films. OutstandingIn this superb melodrama from Todd Haynes, Natalie Portman plays an actor researching her latest role by spending time with the person her character is based on. Step forward Julianne Moore, as a former high-school teacher three decades into a relationship with her former student (Riverdale’s Charles Melton). Catherine Bray But this is where we live our lives. Writing about Oslo, 31 August, Karl Ove Knausgaard (with whom Trier and Vogt collaborated in 2018 on a documentary about Edvard Munch) describes how “it begins in the collective, with memories we all have, while the rest of the film is about a rejection of community, of others”. [3] Before Phillip, Julie and Aksel reject the world, Reprise and The Worst Person also begin with memories we all have: memories of youthful ambition, folly and fun (Trier is nothing if not a director of fun). For Knausgaard, Anders – much like Aksel, Erik and Phillip, and Karl Ove in the My Struggle books (2009-11) – “sees through everything, everything that goes on around him is just empty talk, rubbish, banalities, and that’s how it is, social life is just empty talk, rubbish, banality, and yet that’s where we live our lives”. [4] At best – in Oslo, 31 August, in particular – the Oslo trilogy denounces a conformity seemingly typical of Norwegian society while simultaneously, crucially, recognising empty talk, rubbish, banality as where we live our lives. The return of Wayne McGregor’s all-star interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Thomas Adès’s rich score brings new colours to McGregor’s movement, and Tacita Dean’s transfixing films make the last act a visual feast. Lyndsey Winship Starring Barry Keoghan as a Talented Mr Ripley type initially dazzled by his smooth college chums at Oxford, Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman could be seen as a sort of cautionary tale for toffs who think it might be amusing to invite a member of the working class into their rarefied milieu.

For the last four chapters of the film, the voice of Aksel comes to the fore. Julie is running on a treadmill when she coincidentally sees Aksel (now her ex-boyfriend) on the gym’s television, protecting art against “post-feminist” political correctness on a chat show with two women: two women written, conveniently, to do little to no justice to the complexities of debate around “transgressive” art in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In any case, as the reclusive Sten Egil Dahl tells us in Reprise, a chat show is no place to discuss art and literature. If Aksel loses the battle of the show, a man cancelled for being on the wrong side of contemporary discourse, then he wins the war for art and literature. He leaves the realm of the talk show, Julie’s realm of thinkpieces, as someone who is better than it, too clever for it: misunderstood. Later, in hospital for cancer treatment, Aksel mourns the end of books, films and records as things to hold and to live with. And as Aksel mourns, so too does the film mourn Aksel as the dying voice of art. By ending these last chapters of The Worst Person with Aksel, Trier and Vogt frame the Oslo trilogy firmly as their equivalent to Linklater’s Boyhood or Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, with Phillip-Anders-Aksel as the man who gradually gives up on art and tragically bows out from the world. All in all, the trilogy is a story of men: the last-minute shift in focus to Julie is fleeting and false. Norwegian director Joachim Trier concludes his Oslo Trilogy with the riveting The Worst Person in the World, which is having a preview screening at Lincoln Center on January 28 before opening there on February 4. Shortlisted for Best International Feature Film, it is part of a weeklong series that includes the first two parts of the trilogy, 2006’s Reprise and 2011’s Oslo, August 31st, along with works selected by Trier and cowriter Eskil Vogt that influenced them.

filmmaking and incredible storytelling. The thematic trilogy is one that audiences will certainly find compelling on many levels. Only superficially a reader, Julie is also only superficially a writer, too: all she has to her name is a binned attempt at fiction described by a boyfriend as autobiography and one thinkpiece of the ilk dismissed by Anders in Oslo, 31 August. (Interviewing with a magazine, Anders wryly advises it avoid publishing articles he thinks of as ‘Samantha in Sex in the City seen through Schopenhauer’.) Nonetheless, according to the sporadic voice-over in The Worst Person, Julie’s ‘Oral Sex in the Time of #MeToo’ “sparks lively debate on Facebook”, just as Erik’s Prosopopoeia, according to the third-person voice-over in Reprise “sparks lively debate”. While this is certainly intended as a comment on the changing shape of the public sphere – from serious literature to sex and politics, from newspapers and magazines to Facebook – more interesting, surely, is the discrepancy between the kind of voice Trier and Vogt allow Erik and what kind of voice they allow Julie. In both Reprise and The Worst Person, the voice-over eventually dissolves. Its dissolution in Reprise makes space for Erik to narrate the closing montage of the film: in the future conditional tense, Erik imagines Phillip, his now ailing friend , to be sitting and talking outside a café, not in a hospital but in the world. Dissolution of the voice-over in The Worst Person, however, makes space not for Julie to write, narrate or dream, but for Aksel to rant and lament. The writer of serious literature is permitted the lofty, literary space of the voice-over; the feminist of one thinkpiece is not. Anders Danielsen Lie is brilliant as a young man trapped in a world of his own making in Oslo, August 31st Before there was Hollywood icon Cary Grant, there was Bristol boy Archibald Leach, who had a deeply traumatic childhood. Made in collaboration with Grant’s daughter and ex-wife, this Jason Isaacs-starring biopic traces the actor’s radical transformation from one man to another. RA The Oslo Trilogy is an outstanding collection of three films from filmmaker Joachim Trier: Reprise, Oslo, August

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