Reprise.

"Joachim Trier's dazzlingly kinetic tale of two aspiring Norwegian cult novelists is bounded by fantasies of what might have become of the friends and literary competitors after the publication of their first novels," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "But Reprise - a masculine story whose women come off best - is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic, and strangely beautiful riff on growing up in a broken world."

Updated through 5/16.

"The film is an exhilarating weave of childhood remembrance, projection, literary digression, and impish commentary," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Yet its postmodernism doesn't distance you. Even at its artiest, Reprise could spring from the pages of either protagonist's novel.... It's really a testament to the liberating power of art. You'll come out humming the syntax."

"Trier references DeLillo, Joy Division and Russ Meyer, and gets drunk on possibility in tangents and flash-forwards — when his exhilaration isn't stabbed by self-awareness or drained by depression," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "The difference between totally digging Reprise and just admiring it is maybe a matter of the secret kinship that clicks into place, or doesn't, with each name dropped. Kinda the point, for a movie with the nouvelle vague's love of the personal canon that forges friendships and fuels creativity."

For the New York Times, Dennis Lim meets Trier for an interview and a "double-time tour" through MoMA: "Reprise is as energetic and digressive as its director, leaping ahead and circling back, dropping in jump cuts and freeze frames. Mr Trier acknowledged that the film's tricky structure owed something to time-bending experiments like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and Steven Soderbergh's Limey, as well as to the work of the French director Alain Resnais."

"Joachim Trier's mother was a documentarian, his father a sound department tech, his grandfather a Cannes-selected filmmaker, and his distant cousin Lars von Trier, so is it any surprise that the feature debut of this Copenhagen-born, Norwegian-based director has already turned out to be one of the year's best imports?" Aaron Hillis talks with him for the IFC. Sample question: "But what led to you twice becoming the National Skateboarding Champion of Norway as a teen?"

And Eric Kohn talks with Trier for indieWIRE. Sample question: "You recently introduced your grandfather Eric Lochen's film Remonstrance at Lincoln Center. How did that go?"

Updates: A "minor miracle," writes Brandon Harris, "stylish and suave, touching and humorous, it is perhaps the most propulsive and eminently watchable film about young, ambitious, literary twentysomethings ever made, which, I suppose, makes it tailor made for the chattering, art house set and just about no one else." Even so, "Reprise makes no false moves. It allows you to see the world new again."

"The film plays rough, but it also manages to find just the right places for some raw and edgy humor," writes Moriarty at AICN. "He wraps things up a little too neatly in places in the script, sort of like a punk-rock Richard Curtis, but there’s a lot to like here anyway. He appears to be a huge fan of early Truffaut, and there’s a giddy sense of release to the filmmaking that so often marks the work of young men finally turned loose with a camera."

"What's amazing is how fully you get absorbed into the lives of these characters and how every seemingly disparate scene ultimately makes sense in the grander scheme of things," writes Edward Douglas at Coming Soon. He also talks with Trier.

"[I]t's only a matter of time before Hollywood gets his hands on him and turns him into an anonymous hack," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "That's not merely cynicism or a judgment call on Trier's foregrounded visual flair, which, unlike most other flashy films pitched at the speed of youth, actually contains more true invention than gimmick.... In the rocket-fueled opening montage sequence, twenty-something writers Erik (a lanky and lovely Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (tightly coiled Anders Danielsen Lie), longtime friends out of school and still living in Oslo, mail their respective manuscripts and imagine, in a series of flash-forwards, their possible futures... There's real passion here, and for a while, Trier's verve is exhilarating."

Update, 5/15: "That rare debut in which self-conscious formal daring proves exhilarating rather than excruciating, Joachim Trier's Reprise is a constantly fracturing wonder that finds exuberant expressiveness in its splintered structure," writes Nick Schager.

Updates, 5/16: "An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry - for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies - Reprise is a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Made under the self-knowing influence of the early French New Wave, before Godard discovered Mao and Truffaut lost his groove, the film wears its influences without a trace of anxiety, in part, I imagine, because its precociously talented Norwegian director, Joachim Trier, doesn't worry about old-fashioned conceits like creative patricide. You don't have to kill your fathers, just learn from them."

"For all their emphasis on the youth market, American movies have never done a good job of portraying actual youth," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times:

The idea that young equals dumb prevails - never mind that it's about the only time in life when reading Foucault or sitting through a Tarkovsky double feature is a viable task. What Hollywood tends to ignore is perhaps the central project of late adolescence and early adulthood - the avid, voracious creation of identity through books, movies, music and cultural hero-worship.

Norwegian director Joachim Trier's inspiring first feature Reprise joyfully tackles the process of self-creation, as well as the friendships that feed and sustain it. He captures, in a way that's cool and romantic and heady, the moment in life when nothing matters more than ideas, influences and the possibility of shaping one's life into a work of art.

For Time Out's David Fear, this is "easily the freshest debut to come along in ages. Imagine the intellectually dense pathos of Masculine-Feminine and the punk puckishness of Trainspotting filtered through a Nordic lens darkly, and you're halfway there."

"Now let us import sad young literary men," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Reprise skitters with a heady, hit-the-ground-running style that cools off with the fading of its characters' illusions and energies."

"Like many debut features, Reprise is a foremost a statement of purpose, and in that respect, at least, Trier shows limitless promise," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"Even though both leads spend a fair amount of screen time mired in Scandinavian gloom, the movie never stays still; it's a formal wonder, zipping to and fro in time and space, revisiting the boys' childhoods and imagining multiple possible futures for them," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "The pacing is occasionally a little jerky, with a disproportionate amount of time spent on aimless bull sessions. But the story keeps reeling you back in with mischievous tricks."

Andrew O'Hehir talks with Trier for Salon.

"Reprise is one of the most brilliant, heartfelt, exciting and exuberant feature film debuts in recent memory, and works not just as a demonstration of Trier's substantial talents but also as a superbly-made collaboration," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Trier co-wrote alongside Eskil Vogt, and the film's ensemble (including Lie, Klouman-Hoiner and Viktoria Winge as Phillip's gamine girlfriend Kari) is also superb, down to seemingly-minute supporting roles that are nonetheless perfectly cast, like Eindreide Eisvold's all-seeing but hardly certain dry tone as the narrator." And he talks with Trier, too.

So does Bryan Whitefield at Screengrab.

Posted by dwhudson at May 14, 2008 7:04 AM