He was released on Thursday, January 22, Sentimental Value, the new film by Norwegian director Joachim Trier. Already awarded at Cannes with the Special Grand Prix of the Jury, he received the applause of critics and the public and nine nominations to the Oscar awards, including best film, best director, best actor and actress protagonist and best actress not protagonist, respectively for Stellan Skårsgard (who just won the Golden Globe for the same role), Renate Reinsve and Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas.
Joachim Trier has the cinema flowing in the veins. His grandfather Erik Løchen directed two films, The Hunt (1959) and Remonstrance (1972), and then became artistic director of Norsk Film, a Norwegian production company active until 2001. His father, Jacob Trier, was sound and sound designer, while his mother, Hilde Løchen Trier, worked on several feature films. “I grew up on set.” Norwegian director told in a recent interview with Criterion. “I remember for example being on Jan Troell’s The Swedish Master set and perceiving how kind he was. […] I was moved to see how the actors felt safe. “.
Joachim Trier’s cinema is a cinema of spaces. Each frame is a real theatre for the characters who live there, the place where they can grow, observe, suffer and, above all, relate to each other and to the reality surrounding them. “I’m very obsessed with trying to get into the intimate spaces among people.” Trier always said in an interview for Criterion. “Working with tight frames, reactions and how mounting can stop on those who listen instead of speaking, all this can really create the subjective experience of finding themselves in the middle of some intimate desire for contact among people.”.
This desire can, however, also be transformed into dramatic incommunicability. Think about The worst person in the world, Trier’s latest film before Sentimental Value, who follows the events of a thirty-year-old girl who can’t find her place in the world. Here Julie, interpreted by Renate Reinsve, finds herself constantly inserted in a central space, with the other characters willing to radiate around her, thus emphasizing her being constantly not in harmony with the surrounding context. So, when the viewer hears her say, “I feel the viewer of my own life.” she knows that it is true, because she has seen it more and more times on the screen. This is why space in the films of Trier becomes not only an occasion for expression of the characters, but also, paradoxically, a place of imprisonment from which to escape.
It is no coincidence that it is in Reprise, both in Oslo, 31. august, the first two chapters of the so-called Oslo trilogy, is constantly repeated the phrase “we must leave this country” and “I must leave Oslo.” The first film, the debut of Trier, follows two young friends, Phillip and Erik, who dream of becoming writers. They decide to send their manuscripts to publishing houses. If Phillip sees his dream come true, the same cannot be said of the friend, who is discarded. When the friend will have to resume his life in his hand after a psychotic collapse, however, Erik will be forced to look deep and try to figure out what he really wants.
Oslo, 31. august instead focuses on Anders, a young drug addict in rehabilitation who swings between the desire to regain his life in hand and the temptation to let her go forever while he spends a day wandering from one head to another of the Norwegian capital. In both titles, Oslo is both the stage of narrated events, and a place that is extremely close to the characters, who cannot fully intercept their need for something that goes beyond the mere routine.
“I was interested to see if there was still a desire to be transgressive in young people.” Trier explained about Reprise in an old interview with FilmCatcher. “I think that’s what they aspire to both Erik and Phillip, do something that transcends their everyday lives.” The world for Norwegian filmmakers can then turn out to be a golden prison, a place that pushes down, to settle, to conform. This is also found in Thelma, Trier’s first science fiction thriller. Released in 2017, she follows a girl who discovers that she possesses psychic powers that allow her desires to come true. Thelma, the young protagonist, lives among the extreme control of her parents, who even come to hide her nature, and the need to be herself, to know each other.
The cinema of Trier thus becomes a space of (re)discovered of itself. And, therefore, of memory. About Oslo, 31. august, the director stated in an interview with Sentieri Selvaggi that the film speaks “of memory and identity, of what we have lost and of those who remain next to us, of how we remember each other and of how we move forward together as people.” In fact, the film opens with a series of narrative voices reminiscent of details of their past, their old friends, anfratti of Oslo. Just like in Sentimental Value, here too the figure of the family home becomes central. In Oslo, 31. august the tragedy begins when Anders, the young protagonist, discovers that his parents have sold the family house. In his second film Trier remembers that losing memory is losing a piece of self. It means, therefore, depriving itself of the possibility of being oneself. And, consequently, to find your space.
Yet, the paradox is that, sometimes, to find its place it is necessary to start from memory, recover it, then let go of those spaces that anchor to the past, without real prospect of future. Following the character of Stellan Skarsgård, a director who tries to get closer to his daughters while filming his latest film, in Sentimental Value the Norwegian author resumes Oslo, 31. august and overcome it. This is why the last scene of the Skarsgård film is the final of the second title of the Oslo trilogy. To overcome it, Trier decides to make the most extreme gesture of his cinema: Deconstruct space, destroy it. And in this way, the characters find their space. A space full of life.
Article The spaces of Joachim Trier comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
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