Reprise (2006)

I like movies, I like new movies, I like not afraid to watch a different movie, also I saw the whole movie. Now, why did I not like this movie? For me, there was no point. There was no beginning or end. No story. Just some character development which was OK, the characters seemed interesting. I like that it was in Norway, I like to see how foreign people talk and act. But besides that, i got nothing from this film. It was to choppy and didn't flow very well. People make fun of me for liking "boring" "deep" "drama" type movies but....This movie was actually boring. It touched on a few things like love, and depression/suicide. But on a very shallow level, just a slight touch. Not enough to feel the depression or love ourselves. I do not mind watching movies that have a slow pace, but they have to pay off with some substance, and this movie made me regret even watching it. I usually always say a movie was "ok" but this one was not. I will still watch Oslo 31 august, to visit Norway again, but Reprise was simply to boring and not impact-full enough.

Fmovies: Good direction, great soundtrack, dialog, editing, a surprisingly full movie from a first time director.

Two Norwigian friends in their early twenties Philip and Erik, submit there first manuscripts on the same day, one is accepted and becomes a...(read more) critical darling, the other swims in a sea of rejection letters. In the first five minutes we see at least two altered timeliness of what might have happened to these characters had they both been accepted or had they both been rejected, Run Lola Run style in accelerated montage lead by voice over.

The world which could have been, is then followed by six months later, when Erikis getting out o mental institute after a having suffered a breakdown sometime before, Philip is sticking with him, keeping a spare key, making sure he takes his medication on time, and still trying to get his own work published, which it shortly is.

Erik and Philip, and their motley crew of friends like the the crude Morten singer of such classic punk songs like "Fingerfucked by the Prime Minister", and the intellectually over-zealous "Porno Lars", all hang out and well just hang out.

Erik is trying to recreate his obsessive relationship(against dr's orders), going as far as to meticulously re-create a trip they took to Paris. Philip is debating whether or not to dump his girlfriend so he can sew his whitely oats, and trying to escape the shadow of Eirk and their hero Stein Egl Dahl, their favorite author who also happens to live in their home town.

As the title suggests, the film is about these characters trying to re-create, re-capture the past, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Are you holding onto your dreams or are you clinging to them, are your friends a support group or a crutch to keep out the "real world", do you really love her, or is she just an obsession, should you leave him, or are you just selfish. Is there any way to escape cliché, and live "genuinely"? These are questions which are especially pertinent to the coming of age twenty somethings in the film, but they are universal questions everyone probably at numerous times in their life will have to face. And this film captures them, the highs, the lows, and the cream filled centers...good stuff.

Joachim Trier has definitely accomplished something with his debut feature film. The opening sequence is so disorienting that you can't begin to expect what will happen next. Showing a montage of what "could" happen once our two leads mail out their manuscripts, from success to failure to meeting again and succeeding together, is a bold move. I wasn't sure if we had just been privy to the entire film condensed and would soon see the details, or if the title of the film would be taken literally and we'd see a Reprise of the events. Of course, the latter is what occurred. After the montage, we are transported back to that fateful moment of their first novels being submitted for publishing. This time, however, in the real world, only Phillip succeeds in getting a book deal done while Erik is rejected to try again. Both young men then find their lives going in different directions only to converge once more at a dark place for both, a time for a rebirth in life for Phillip and career for Erik.

The gimmick of showing the audience multiple vignettes of the past throughout the film never seems forced. Always seamlessly giving us insight and background into the proceedings, these teleportations through time help flesh out our characters and their motivations. We learn how these two writers got mixed up with a group of friends a little rougher around the edges than them, how Phillip and his girlfriend Kari met, the boys' affinity for author Sten Egil Dahl, and much more. The most brilliant use is when Phillip and Kari go to Paris to relive the journey that made them fall in love the first time. A trip where he hopes to regain those feelings he had been programmed to forget during his stint in a mental hospital, the mixing of scenes from the first time and this current time are nice. The dialogue is overlapping the images, sporadically rejoining with the mouth movements of the characters before getting unsynched again. Words and images don't necessarily have to converge here, whether it the voice of the leads or that of the narrator. A story is being told; we are shown what could happen in their lives, not necessarily the end all.

When the final black screen of Stop is shown, you begin to wonder what other way the story could have gone. What could have happened if Erik found initial success and not Phillip? Would the latter's psychosis still have cropped up? Would Erik have fallen fast into pretentiousness like fellow writer Mathis Wergeland? Who knows? Trier just gives us a glimpse of this one way that it can happen, and for once it is not the easy way out. What continues on as a tragedy, one where you can just feel something horrific will occur, to the point where the director puts us in a sequence that screams suicide is made all the more powerful by the prospect of happiness at the end. The opening introduction ends on a happy note, so there is always hope the meat of the film will too, despite the allusions to epic tragedy of Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Overall, the actual activity of writing a novel has little to do with the meaning of the film. It is just the occupation of these two men, the driving force of their lives and impetus for how they live. What Reprise truly concerns is the meaning of life and how one chooses to live it. It is a cyclical path bringing people in and out of each other's vision for good or worse at the most random times. Relationships play a huge role as well, whether they are romantic or platonic. Erik and Phillip have a bond with one anoth

Reprise fmovies. Joachim Trier's smart, witty first film about a group of talented Oslo twenty-somethings won a prize at Toronto and was Norway's Oscar entry. 'Reprise' focuses on Erik (Espen Klouman Hoiner, who's blond, and smiles practically all the time) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie, dark-haired, crew-cut, and wide-eyed). They're well-off, presentable, and ambitious young men (and best friends) who try to launch writing careers by submitting manuscripts at the same moment. They also share a passion for the same reclusive novelist, Sten Egil Dahl (Sigmund Saeverud). The film amuses us right away by showing a series of alternative possible outcomes to the young men's ambitions with quicksilver editing and a bright voice-over--a light approach which, with the close artistic friendship in the story's foreground, brings up memories of the Nouvelle Vague and especially Truffaut's 'Jules et Jim.' The screenplay, appropriately for a treatment of young people on the brink of maturity, constantly toys with possibilities, which we briefly see. Much of its charm is in the editing, but the opening segment is such a flood of wit, it's a little hard to sustain it.

Moreover things turn a bit more Nordic and dark when Philip is the one to get published first, but immediately has a psychotic episode--partly attributed by doctors and family to his "obsessive" love for his girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge)--that lands him for a while in a sanatorium. Much of the film that follows deals with the problems for Phillip and the problems Phillip poses for others after his psychosis emerges.

Now Erik gets a MS. accepted, a little novel (we guess) called 'Prosopopeia.' He thinks that with this event, he must end his relationship with his longtime girlfriend Lillian (Silje Hagen) -- a decision perpetually put off that may recall Matthieu Amalric's wavering over Emmanuelle Devos in Arnaud Desplechin's similar study of a group of (a bit older) intellectual young people, the 1996 'My Sex Life. . .or How I Got Into an Argument.'

Reprise is full of little ironies, some a bit obvious. There's one friend who acts as a mentor for the guys. He says not to have girlfriends -- they'll make you settle into a life of watching TV series and having nice dinners and give you too little time to read and listen to music, he says. Then, wouldn't you know it, he's the first one to wind up married and living the bourgeois family life. Another easy irony is the way the pretty editor at Phillip's publisher's is first utterly repelled by an older punk rock band friend's politically incorrect and offense chatter, then later is drawn to him like a magnet and marries him.

The film's co-writer Eskil Vogt studied at La Feris, and his French residence comes out in the way two segments of Reprise take place in Paris, where Philip and Kari first discover they're in love and where they go back after his mental problems to recapture the feeling, with mixed success.

Erik and Phillip know where the reclusive Sten Egil Dahl lives and occasionally spy on him. Phillip shoots Erik on a bench pretending to talk with the writer but forgets to remove the lens cap so the photo is a blank. Undeterred, Erik enlarges the resulting black rectangle and hangs it in a prominent place on his wall. Later it turns up as an emblem on the jacket of his book.

Erik performs badly on TV after 'Prosopopeia' is out (arguments over the odd title stand in fo

Since I saw a movie that i could relate to as much. In some ways it really felt like my life with my group of friends when I was longer.

I truly enjoyed that movie, there is a feeling to it and the cinematography is excellent. The actors were amazing. I went to look at their profile and it seems that most of them don't have a lot of experience but it doesn't show, on the contrary, there is a freshness to their performance, they are quite good.

The Soundtrack is amazing, from Joy Division to New Order and other cool music that unfortunately I don't know yet about. Totally what I needed to watch in the cold snow storm coming down right now in Montréal.

See it!

Five good friends. Young men not yet settled into career lives. Two are trying to become authors. Phillipe gets published quickly, while Erik is struggling to get his first book out. Phillipe proves to be suffering from a psychosis that interferes with his writing. That is in a nutshell the film's backbone. However there is a lot more going on.

The complex narrative with multiple characters is told in a quirky, original style. Time-lines are heavily sliced. Multiple takes are intercut into seamless conversations. Explanatory flashbacks are inserted almost as if they are part of the action. And so on. It's all fresh, fast moving, and fun to watch.

It is a bittersweet story of young adults leaving behind the carefree existence of dreamers and gravitating towards the settled lives of older adults. The characters are well conceived. Their antics and clever dialogue provide much of the material for the many funny screwball moments. Great debut film for the director.