Oslo, August 31st
Winter 2013 Features series
Sunday, March 24, 2013 at 4:00pm
Sunday, March 24, 2013 at 7:00pm
Acadia Cinema's Al Whittle Theatre
450 Main Street, Wolfville, NS
Directed by Joachim Trier
Screenplay by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
Based on the book by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Starring Ingrid Olava, Hans Olav Brenner, and Anders Danielsen Lie
Rated NR ·
1h 35m
Norway
Norwegian
Oslo, August 31st
Director Joachim Trier brings us one day in the life of Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a young recovering drug addict. Anders will soon complete his drug rehabilitation in the countryside. As part of the program, he is allowed to go into the city for a job interview. But he takes advantage of the leave and stays on in the city, drifting around, meeting people he has not seen in a long while. At 35, he is being asked to step back into the world, and he has no idea where to put his feet.
Anders is smart, handsome and from a good family, but deeply haunted by all the opportunities he has wasted, all the people he has let down. He is still relatively young, but feels his life in many ways is already over. For the remainder of the day and long into the night, the ghosts of past mistakes will wrestle with the chance for love, the possibility of a new life and the hope to see some future by morning.
“The film is based on Le Feu Follet, a 1931 novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle that director Louis Malle turned into a very good and very different movie, 1963’s The Fire Within. If there’s a French filmmaker whose influence hovers over Oslo like a benediction, though, it’s the great Robert Bresson, whose movies are similarly austere yet forgiving, specific yet universal. Trier has acknowledged the debt in interviews, but he finds his own path here. The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.” (Ty Burr, The Boston Globe)
“Trier’s compassion for what it takes to survive, mixed with the love he bestows on Oslo, is rewardingly profound.” (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly)