CLIP Sound of someone opening mailbox and dropping manuscripts in then narrator begins.
Then a narrator takes over the story to present a montage about their fates... The narrator suggests that Erik and Philip will get published, find cult fame, grow disillusioned, fall in and out of love, and then cause a revolution. But wait... this is only one possible outcome. The narrator pauses, the film cuts to black...and suddenly we're back at the mailbox.
CLIP Erik and Phillip again drop manuscripts into mailbox.
Director Joachim Trier describes this open as an overture.
JOACHIM TRIER: "People are given a little taste of what's to come but in a very fixed condensed way."
Trier says he and co-writer Eskil Vogt wanted to explore not only what happens to Phillip and Erik but also with what might have happened. So as the film moves back and forth in time via flashbacks and jump cuts, the narrator observes the characters from the outside and speaks in a literary voice. Here the narrator begins by describing Erik's concerns as he arrives to break up with his girlfriend.
JOACHIM TRIER: "He's kind of an authorial voice, a voice that describes dreams or abstractions or maybe digressive thoughts, thoughts on the sides of the main plot."
Joachim Trier's debut feature Reprise (Miramax)
So the guilt and awkwardness that Erik feels about dumping his girlfriend prompts a flashback to his childhood and another shameful experience - this time involving his mother and a lecture on Internet porn.
Mom: "Erik..."
JOACHIM TRIER: "We're very inspired by Woody Allen. Annie Hall for example to me is a playful film. It's full of formal tricks and small experiments that work wonderfully."
Like when Woody Allen's Alvy Singer takes us back to his childhood or pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind a movie poster to weigh in on an argument. Richard Pena chose Reprise as part of The Film Society's prestigious New Directors/New Films program. He says Trier's style springs organically from the characters' inability to maintain focus.
RICHARD PENA: "One minute they are discussing philosophy and then suddenly they see a pretty girl and their heads turn and suddenly their whole conversation goes in a whole other direction."
With Trier in hot pursuit. Pena says the way the film jumps from one idea to the next captures the youthful exuberance of the two young men. Trier compares his technique to the fragmentation you find in hip-hop music.
JOACHIM TRIER: "The idea of sampling almost, and the break between things like the montage in film and certainly the hard breaks in certain hip hop music are quite inspiring you become formally aware that you are listening to something where someone is scratching a record."
Reprise (Miramax)
Joachim Trier's brash cinematic sampling draws on diverse sources yet it spins something defiantly fresh and original.
Companion viewing: Annie Hall; Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Don't Look Now; The Hunt (by Trier's grandfather Erik Lochen)
