The best films scramble your brain, changing you slightly. You emerge from the dark with new, blinking eyes, adjusting to a different world. It’s why for many of us a good movie is a small miracle, worthy of devotion. So far, Norwegian director Joachim Trier has made two such small miracles, Reprise and Oslo, August 31st. Two sharp films that, when I saw them, settled down into some small part of me, changing the way I thought about youth, ambition, and the meaning of life, if only for a night. I suspect the films of Trier speak particularly to anyone with literary ambitions, anyone who knows what it’s like to be besotted by a work of art and anyone who wants to create something strong and beautiful and true. The director has an uncanny eye for the worries of sad young men afflicted with dreaminess about art and ideas, the same sort of disease written about in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer or Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. His exuberant, French New Wave–influenced debut, Reprise, is the story of two boyish twenty-something writers wrestling with literary ambitions and madness. Reprise is charming, formally daring, and focused on youthful folly; in Oslo, August 31st, the folly is over, and it’s time for the morning after.
more from Elisabeth Donnelly at Paris Review here.