Oslo, 31 août

This guy gets out of rehab. One of the reasons he's been there is Oslo, but it's Oslo he returns to, when leaving.

Life is about to proceed. The lives of others, that is. The guy from rehab slowly understands that he is dead and there is no way of getting back to what he anyway never had. Oslo is merciless.

Strong drama about the hopelessness a person feels while entering middle-age knowing that he has no experiences, no history, except for the well-known feeling of being worthless. Which isn't an experience in itself. It all ends with a cliffhanger. The chasm is the possibility of getting older.

Triers second film in his Oslo trilogy depicts the complexities of how it is to return to a familiar place under different circumstances.

In Oslo, August 31st, we meet Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a former drug addict. Anders is on his day out from rehab in Oslo to attend a job interview. Before and after the interview, he takes the opportunity to meet up with friends, and problems left undone.

This is one of the best norwegian films out there, mainly because of how it depicts the urban city life in Oslo, and the challenges which follows a recovering drug addict. As a norwegian and a former Oslo citizen, this film hit me hard. With its social realistic style, this film makes you not just reflect upon the lives of drug addicts through the perspective of Anders, but also life in general through the conversation that Anders has with his friends.

Oslo, August 31st is a socratic masterpiece.

The opening and closing minutes of Oslo, August 31rst are peerless filmmaking, a simultaneously nostalgic and disturbing slideshow of images from the titular city, which appears as some kind of larger supernatural entity with a will of its own. The film that they bracket is pretty decent too. It's a quiet slice of cinema verite about Anders, a recovering drug addict.

This isn't your standard AA-approved narrative of redemption, and that's what makes it good. Anders discovers that the world outside is frosty, ambivalent towards him, and most of all banal and meaningless. Of course, the difficulty is portraying banality without being banal yourself, and Trier doesn't entirely succeed here. But it does provide, on top of the more philosophical statement, a great representation of the difficulty of getting back into society after leaving it. Oslo, August 31rst is smart enough to see the social barriers that make the standard addiction narrative so deceitful.

Other than the immediately striking opening, there's nothing overtly impressive about this film. It has its flaws, such as the ending, which seems contrived compared to everything that's come before. But it's a quietly solid picture that certainly deserves a little of your time.

I think I learned about this film when I searched for the highest rated films on Rotten Tomatoes. I saw it had earned nearly universal high marks, so I decided to check it out.

It follows a recovering addict named Anders who is granted a leave from the rehab clinic where he is currently residing to go into Oslo for a job interview. While in Oslo, which he has not visited in some time since going to the clinic, he meets a number of old friends, attempts to reconnect with a former girlfriend, and visits some old haunts.

That is essentially all in the way of plot. What makes the film so affecting are the conversations he has with these friends about life, feelings of regret, lost opportunities, etc. The conversations seemed so authentic and realistic; the writers never gave into the temptation of injecting false notes of sentimentality..

Even though Anders is an addict, this isn't really an "addiction movie." His addiction is always there in the background, but the themes that the film explores are far more universal and general. And the lead actor's performance was very poignant and impressive. I definitely recommend this to anybody interested in a strong dialog and character-driven film.

The sober rationality of the young Norwegian intellectual classes provides a perfectly blank canvas on which to paint the conversely complex neuroses of the anti-hero, Anders. Anders is an intelligent and gifted opinionist and writer, but his addiction has left him riddled with insecurity. The film focuses on the most pivotal moment of this young man's life as he's tragically stuck between recovery and regression: that moment is both sprinkled with glimmers of hope and drenched in melancholia. Anders' contradiction is the eternal paradox of the addict, and perhaps Trier is presenting it as an allegory of the modern human condition. Anders Danielsen Lie gives an incredible performance as the enigmatic hero and the acting throughout is consistently authentic, convincing and engrossing. The soft-focus cinematography (Jakob Ihre) works well with a particularly engaging sound design which, along with very conscious direction, editing and general production design, makes for technically masterful cinema with an aesthetic that is both selectively minimal and enjoyably rich. Oslo is a tragedy. Its simple, melancholic tone and metropolitan landscapes make the film undeniably reminiscent of the French New Wave - think Hiroshima Mon Amour in present day Oslo. The film is minimal and stylized, presenting social realism in an artistic form without losing any of its dramatic potency to surrealism. Utterly convincing and captivating: an instant indie classic.