Northern touch

Norwegian oddity O’Horten is a minimal and
quirky character study

SOLITARY MAN: Bård Owe

by MALCOLM FRASER,

Norwegian director Bent Hamer’s films include the Cannes prize winner Kitchen Stories and a detour into Hollywood (albeit the grimy side) with the Bukowski adaptation Factotum. His latest, O’Horten, actually has nothing to do with donuts or anything Irish. It stars Bård Owe (who you might recognize from Lars von Trier’s Europa and The Kingdom) as Odd Horten, a shy and solitary railway engineer who we follow during his retirement and its strange aftermath. Following an interrupted retirement party, Horten spends the film wandering from one peculiar situation to the next, slowly revealing aspects of his personality and history as he meets various characters.

As in a dream, the events are slightly surreal, seemingly random and vaguely symbolic. In one scene, he accidentally ends up in the bedroom of a strange little boy who demands that he keep him company; in another, while he’s swimming at a pool after hours, his shoes go missing from the locker room so he leaves wearing a young woman’s bright red high heels. Yet unlike other films that use dream logic—David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman come to mind—O’Horten never tips over into outright surrealism, but keeps one foot in reality, as though Horten’s retirement is like the space between waking and sleep (or perhaps a purgatorial state between life and death).

Shot in Norway during the winter, the film has a stark aesthetic matched with a minimal cinematic style. Like other recent Scandinavian films such as Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and Jens Lien’s The Bothersome Man, it seems to speak somehow to the Nordic character. Weighty with melancholy, the characters speaking little and keeping a lid on their emotions, the film and its performances are a study in subtlety and restraint.

Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past was perhaps the masterpiece of this school of austere Scandinavian style. Although Hamer doesn’t quite reach that level with O’Horten, he does pull off the tricky balancing act of a film that’s slow and minimal without being boring, and quirky without being annoyingly cute. Understated and charming, it’s a nice middle ground between the brain-numbing pablum of Hollywood and the challenges of the hardcore arthouse zone.

O’HORTEN OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JUNE 5