‘Oslo’s addict on desperate personal journey
“Oslo, August 31st” is not just a day and a place, it is an entry point into a life, a life that this spare, measured, immaculately made film allows us to enter at the worst possible moment.
Directed by Norway’s top young director, Joachim Trier (whose last film was the festival hit “Reprise”), “Oslo” is an example of strong, confident filmmaking in which nothing is miscalculated or out of place. Anchored by a devastating performance by Anders Danielsen Lie, this portrait of existential despair is beautifully made without being self-conscious about its art.
Trier and co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt have freely adapted the same novel, Pierre Dreiu La Rochelle’s 1931 “Le Feu Follet,” that was the basis of a gripping 1963 French film directed by Louis Malle and called in English “The Fire Within.” While that film’s protagonist was struggling with alcohol addiction, Danielsen Lie’s Anders is a recovering heroin addict, a soul in torment about to enter a personal hell.
As the film opens on Aug. 30, Anders is a few weeks away from completing an extensive drug rehabilitation procedure at a residential institution in Oslo’s suburbs. He’s been clean for 10 months, and before heading out to a sanctioned job interview in the city he tells his therapy group that nothing remarkable is going on with him.
That, as we’ve already seen, is far from true, because just a few hours before the session Anders has unsuccessfully attempted to kill himself. His trip to Oslo turns out to involve more than a job interview. The camera follows Anders as he simultaneously visits key people from his past and searches with well-hidden anxiety for a reason to go on with his life.
Anders can sound willful and self-indulgent when described in print, so it is a tribute to the way “Oslo” has been put together and to Danielsen Lie’s gifts as an actor that he comes off as a character we care about deeply.
Though he starred in Trier’s “Reprise,” Danielsen Lie is not a trained performer but rather a practicing doctor. Yet he has a remarkable ability to get inside interior characters and bring them alive through body language and facial expressions as much as language. He simply becomes Anders and takes us with him on his fraught journey.
The malaise that’s tearing Anders apart has numerous sources, and it is their interplay and opposition that makes him so compelling. He’s unwilling to “start from scratch” at age 34, distraught at the pain and difficulty he’s caused those closest to him, and he is congenitally unable to accept easy answers.
In some ways too smart, too questioning for his own good, Anders is a seeker who has ceased to connect with life, someone not content with obvious remedies to his discontents. When a woman at that group session confesses that giving up drugs means “the black void is back, relief is gone,” she could have been talking about him.
The first person Anders visits is his onetime best friend and fellow party animal Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), now married with a small daughter. The child asks who Anders is and is told, “Daddy used to party with him.” Though initially wary, the men end up having an intense conversation in which they speak with searing honesty about the paths their lives have taken.
As Anders’ day continues through to that job interview, a scheduled meeting with his estranged sister and an unexpected visit to a party, he periodically takes time to leave emotional phone messages for his former girlfriend, now living in New York.
It is not simply Anders’ pessimism and doubts that make “Oslo, August 31st” so gripping but the way he wrestles with his parallel yearning to connect, his unarticulated but obvious desperation to find a reason to live. This is, of course, a classic conflict, and this unflinching film does it full justice.