Not much in today's Arts section of the NY Times ... other than the promise of a very interesting film, Joachim Trier's "Reprise," discussed in Manohla Dargis's review of the New Directors/New Films festival.
According to Dargis, "Reprise" is a "galvanizing first feature [that] traces the parallel adventures of two best friends whose twinned literary aspirations and everyday lives take the shape of a punk-rock bildungsroman."
In an interview with Trier -- a two-time Norwegian skateboard champion -- and the film's author, Eskil Vogt, at Twitch, here, Trier describes the movie's story and the filmic vocabulary that he employs in telling that story this way:
The way people talk, the relationships, and ... an attitude, I think. It’s not random why we chose to tell the story in this way, we wanted to sort of mirror the way the minds of these young guys work. We wanted to express their temperament through form; someone yesterday called it “dirty formalism” which I quite like. Another journalist called it “Antonioni on amphetamines”. Such a huge compliment. I think it’s the combination of the music, and these characters that we know really well and the things we care about: friendship; dreams and ambition; and memory and identity.
The way in which Trier and Vogt address questions of memory and identity sounds particularly arresting. As Dargis notes,
The title of Erik’s novel, “Prosopopoeia,” which comes from the Greek and means making a face or a mask, offers a strong clue as to what Mr. Trier and Mr. Vogt are after: the word prosopopoeia figures importantly in the work of the literary theorist Paul de Man, for whom it is a dominant rhetorical trope of autobiography.“We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” writes Mr. de Man, “but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine life?”
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