O'Horten
Dir: Bent Hamer
Rating: 4.0
Sony Pictures Classics
90 minutes
Crap films can serve a very important purpose outside of making you spit beer all over the screen. The night before the screening of O'Horten I sat through (half by choice, I'll admit it) The Substitute 2: School's Out, starring the too-cuddly-to-take-seriously Treat Williams as a mercenary who poses as a substitute teacher in order to -- okay, it doesn't really matter what criminal conspiracy he uncovers in the school's car mechanic class or which local hoodlums are involved. What does matter is that The Substitute 2 is essential in understanding what makes films like O'Horten so special.
I bring up an American action movie not to be an ironic hipster or pad out my review of Bent Hamer's very Norwegian film, but rather because both films have feature a very specific shot that perhaps illuminates why O'Horten is a quality film and The Substitute 2 is not.
During the opening credits of O'Horten we observe the point of view of a train as it moves through a vast snowy Scandinavian landscape to pitch-black tunnels and out into snow. Soon enough a pattern emerges: white to black, light to dark, life to death -- an endless cycle on a fixed track. The last time the screen goes black in the title, suddenly we're inside the train, behind Odd, our protagonist. It's a seamless transition.
Meanwhile, there is a tracking shot in The Substitute 2 that moves around a living room as two characters have a conversation. The camera pans along the foregrounded shelf trinkets while the two characters sit on the couch in the background, completely out of focus. The movement leads nowhere as the film quickly cuts to a more conventional shot of the two characters talking. Why is there a cut? Did the camera eventually come into focus as it moved in on the characters? Did an editor decide this took too long? Where's the payoff? It's not only horrendous editing, but it reveals the seams of the film in such a way that it's unintentionally Godardian. What does that say about Godard?
Suddenly the importance of visual style is clear. It's the difference between Swingers and Made or why most Kevin Smith films feel like TV productions of table readings. Understanding this, Bent Hamer and cinematographer John Christian Rosenlund render the deadpan absurdist odyssey of retired train conductor Odd Horten in a palette of blues and grays -- a muted, depressing palette that makes the proceedings even more absurd as a man drives blindfolded or when Odd's fellow train conductors engage in a chant to see off their retiring peer (hint: chuggachuggachuggachuggachuggaWOOWOO).
The cinematography of O'Horten rarely falls short of gorgeous. I'm dazzled by the bookendedness of it all, with its deliberately symmetrical shots and their frequent use of frames-within-frames -- a symmetry reflecting of its hero. Odd, a humble, neat gentleman, is as well put together as the film bearing his name. The film may follow Odd's bizarre adventures in retirement, but one imagines that if it were to render an average day in his life the film would look about the same. The composition is as careful and deliberate as Odd's uniform, and far more pleasing than, for example, a simple shot of two people walking and talking in The Substitute 2-- which looked so point-and-shoot that I stopped to wonder how better to render such a mundane act. Like I said, crap movies are good for something.
Unlike more conventional films (The Substitute 2 included, of course), O'Horten allows its shots to breathe. A one-sided conversation between Odd and his silent, potentially senile mother does not rely on constant shot-reverse-shot to lead the viewer's attention from character to character. The camera stays in one place with both Odd and Old Mother Horten in frame until it feels a need to lead us -- cutting to a close-up on the grapes in Mother Horten's hand, for example, or when Odd walks across the room to look at a picture frame. Nary a cut unnecessary.
So often is editing a needless ADD-stricken crutch for spicing up perceived monotony. There's a shot of Odd abandoning a car at an intersection that is rendered in one uninterrupted take (save for yet another important insert), seen from the top of a building looking down. For a lesser film, this would simply be an establishing shot of the car pulling up, after which we'd cut to Odd leaving the car and crossing the street. Cut to the police car driving up. Cut to Odd's reaction shot. Cut to the police officer investigating the car. Cut to Odd watching intently. Cut to more investigation. Cut to Odd walking off. Cut to me falling asleep.
Outside of aesthetics, O'Horten depicts the unfamiliarity of life change, aging and the uplifting potential that comes with it in a way that never manipulates, unlike something like The Bucket List, which forces an audience to laugh through its tears. Star Baard Owe leads us on his seemingly mundane adventure with an introverted stoicism which, coupled with the film's deliberate style, renders any instance of the absurd completely deadpan. While it may seem difficult to get into Odd's head and understand his motivation as a character, we get the sense that he doesn't really want us in there. The film might get the dreaded "quirky" label, but it is a subdued, mundane kind of weird as opposed to a forced, insistent weirdness appropriate for a world where a man of cautious routine treads into unfamiliar territory. Beats Treat Williams stabbing B.D. Wong with a screwdriver.
by Danny Djeljosevic