This film follows a group of friends, the nucleus of which are two young authors, Phillip and Erik. They're devotees of Sten Egil Dahl, a made-up literary doyen. They've grown up saving lunch money to buy his books and harbour desires to match his exploits. Despite being sharp young men, under their, admittedly brilliant posturing, they are subject to the same emotional problems as other young men of their age, they just have superb spiel to camouflage it. The posture involves encyclopedic knowledge of punk and post-punk music, understated yet highly deliberate image crafting using clothing from the likes of Fred Perry and punk-compromise hairstyles, as well as cine-literacy and knowledge of the canon of avant-garde literature. A more level-headed view would be that they're quite well off, complacent, and participating in another variation of consumerism. But I have some level of appreciation for people who are able to create their own world when they find they don't like the one everyone else lives in. An anthropologist might view their behaviour as comprising a sexual strategy.Erik and Phillip have different amorous complications. Erik has the fairly misogynistic idea that as a young writer, his girlfriend will impede his talent, that there is no intellectual value in relationships (his friend Lars refers to women lulling one into a life of nice dinners and TV series). Phillip falls victim to obsessional love. The ghost of the nouveau roman is in the workings of this movie. Books from both Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet are on bookshelves in the movie. As well as overt games with style and structure in the movie, both authors were concerned with obsessional love. The movie shows Phillip and Erik watching Marguerite Duras' short film Césarée, accompanied by the perfection of Amy Flamer's violin score. The movie is about an intense all-consuming love and ends with the line "L'endroit s'appelle Césarée / Cesarea. Il n'y a plus rien à voir. Que le tout" Duras' narration of her own text refers to a love story from antiquity, between Berenice Queen of the Jews, and Titus, Emperor of Rome, she says that nothing is left, except for everything, the whole. The permanent has remained, the self-consuming love of Berenice. Phillip it's clear, has connected to the movie more than Erik.One has to wonder how many references Joachim Trier has made in this movie, Cesarée is quite the obscure film (by absolute fluke it's also my favourite film). The moment in the film is meaningless if you're not one of the handful of people on the planet who will have seen both films. There are levels and levels of textual games in this movie and although I'm not usually won over by these things, Reprise is a masterpiece in those terms. There's a narrator of obscure and paradoxical identity, flashforwards, alternative timelines, passages of uncertain chronological placement, implied but uncertain sections and a plethora of textual references.One is sometimes tempted to doubt the worthiness of the two authors. Geir for example is not of the same alert intellectual character as the others in the circle of friends, and it's suggested he's tolerated because he's good at getting tickets for Kommune gigs (an invented band). However, the movie gradually reveals a lot of warmth under the sneers and insults this group trade.The soundtrack is particularly good here, in particular Le Tigre's Deceptacon and Georges Delerue's iconic Theme de Camille from Godard's movie Le Mepris.Kept my eyes open long after midnight which is rare.

The Norwegian drama, "Reprise," is the first feature-length work by Danish-born director Joachim Trier - a premier effort that bodes great things for his future as a filmmaker. He is clearly alive to the possibilities of the medium, as reflected in the original, highly idiosyncratic style he brings to the film. Trier deftly employs many of the tools of the filmmaker's trade - narration, flashbacks, flash forwards, near-subliminal quick cuts to show imagined events, etc. - to convey his story. Yet, rare for a newcomer, Trier never indulges in any of these "tricks" for their own sweet sake or to call attention to his own ingenuity; they are always placed at the service of the material, never the other way around. Best friends from childhood, Erik and Phillip share the hope of one day becoming writers whose works will go beyond the merely commercial to challenge the status quo - thereby earning them the coveted status of "cult" authors. As it turns out, Phillip's novel is published, but Erik's is not, yet Phillip winds up paying a price for his success, namely an emotional breakdown that has Erik performing a near-round-the-clock suicide-prevention watch on his friend. Meanwhile, Erik continues on with his writing, experiencing success and disappointment - both professional and personal - along the way.Erik and Phillip are both extremely complex characters, and Trier provides no penny-ante analysis to make them more easily understandable for the audience. Sometimes it's hard to tell what exactly it is that is bothering the two, except that, in Philip's case at least, it might be actual mental illness that lies at the root of his problem. Like many creative types, Erik and Phillip seem incapable of not over-analyzing and over-intellectualizing every single aspect of their lives, often resulting in a chronic dissatisfaction with themselves and the world around them. As writers, they become obsessed with trying to convey every single nuance of life through language, and when they fail at that endeavor - as they inevitably do - the only viable option left for them seems to be either depression or madness. As a consequence of all this, their relationships with women don't work out - and even their own longtime friendship threatens to come apart at the seams the deeper they go into brutal self-awareness. As Erik and Phillip, Espen Klouman-Hoiner and Anders Danielsen Lie give supple, sensitive performances, as does Viktoria Winge as Phillip's on-again/off-again love interest. The screenplay is rich in texture and sophisticated in theme, while the film-making itself sparkles with bold creativity and unfettered imagination.As touching as it is thought-provoking, "Reprise" is a remarkably accomplished and assured piece of film-making - especially coming from a first timer.

Nothing about this film feels authentic. These guys are supposed to be writers but we never learn what they write about. They easily could've been accountants or insurance salesmen. Designating them as writers seems like a shortcut to make us think these guys are "deep" when in reality they come off like characters from a bad American Gen X 1990s movie. Then there is the music: it's the music I love, the music I listened to in my 20s but I am now 44. I suspect the filmmakers are my age as well and didn't bother to research what young people have been listening to for the past 2 decades. It would be like if a movie about 20 somethings was made in 1986 and the soundtrack were filled with nothing but Black Oak Arkansas, Iron Butterfly and Disco Tex And The SeXollettes.I really didn't care about any of these banal characters & feel the editing is a gimmick to distract the viewer from the fact that nothing interesting is happening or being said.

Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) are friends, both writers, both fans of elder writer Sten Egil Dahl (Sigmund Sæverud). They finish their books around the same time, and dare to submit them only by dropping them into the mailbox at the same time.While awaiting a reply, they hang out with their guy friends, a superficial bunch of misogynists who think girlfriends are a drag on creativity, free time, and ability to be interesting. IMDb lists Henning (Henrik Elvestad), Lars (Christian Rubeck), Morten (Odd Magnus Williamson), Jan Eivind (Henrik Mestad), and Geir (Pål Stokka), but I couldn't keep them all straight.Philip's book is accepted; Erik's is not. But while Erik suffers self-doubt and possibly, Philip suffers a nervous breakdown.A voice-over narrator (Eindride Eidsvold) blames Philip's nervous breakdown on his obsessive love for his girlfriend Kari (Viktoria Winge), who is advised not to visit him in the mental hospital to avoid making him worse. He reminisces about the trip he took her on to Paris, where he tricked her into falling in love with him, as he remembered it.SPOILER PARAGRAPH: Meanwhile, Erik manages to beat his book into publishable condition, and his editor Johanne (Rebekka Karijord) tries to talk him out of his title, Prosopopeia, which the editor considers too obscure. (The film doesn't ever define it; I had to look it up. It's a Greek word meaning "anthropomorphism" or "personification".) When it sells, he feels obligated to dump his girlfriend Lillian (Silje Hagen), apparently thinking himself too good for her once he's a published author. But he wimps out, and sticks with her.When Philip has recovered enough to be released from the mental hospital, they go back to their routine with the annoying guy friends. He tries to write another book. Kari and Philip meet up again, and they go back to Paris in hopes of repeating the falling-in-love trip (apparently the "reprise" of the title, which means roughly the same thing in Norwegian).Near the end, someone dies.Director Joachim Trier uses a style that is distinctive, but I'm not sure it's good. In most shots with more than one person, he frames the people just a little too tightly, with backs of heads in two-shots crowded out, and people on edges of group shots only half in the frame. Every scene seems to have a desaturated blue color to it. To the film's credit, the shots are in focus, and although most or all shots are hand-held they're steady. I rate the directing fair (5).The director and Eskil Vogt wrote the script. Although the directing isn't much good, the script is the film's worst weakness. Philip is mentally ill, which could make him an interesting subject for a film, but all the film does with his illness is show him enter and leave a mental hospital, and fail to write a decent second book. Erik struggles with his self-doubt and apparent lesser writing talent, but the film's presentation of him is so vague that his struggles aren't interesting either. Their literary idol is vaguely interesting in his brief screen time, but he's a bit part at best. Their male friends are unlikeable, but not in an interesting way – they're just a bunch of guys who hang around and complain about women.The most interesting characters are the three women. Kari is the best-developed character in the film, even though she gets less screen time than Philip or Erik. Johanne is interesting because she actually does something other than whine about teen-angst, which the mostly late-20s characters should have outgrown. Lillian is a small part, but she's interesting because the misogynist chorus seems to have a special dislike for her, which could be an interesting story.One good point in the script is that there are a few scattered scenes that are funny – not great comedy work, but at least it was a break from the tedium. Overall, I rate the story lackluster (4).The acting is all solid, most notably that of Viktoria Winge. But the good acting goes to waste on a script that is dull, and directing that obscures the performances.One good point of the film was interesting music, featuring Norwegian bands and various punk rock.On the basis of the lackluster story, and other elements that don't do much to elevate the film, I rate it lackluster (4) overall.My wife and I saw this at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival. It was even worse for my wife than for me. She had seen it in Norway, sucked in by favorable reviews. She didn't like it. Then she ended up seeing again, because of an unannounced festival schedule change. I suggested she slip out and shop, or otherwise have some fun, but I figured I'd sit through it to see if it just didn't work for her. But she decided to give it a second try, thinking maybe there was something admirable about it that she missed the first time. No such luck; it was just as boring the second time.