OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
In Oslo, a man and a woman, Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) and Julie (Renate Reinsve), in their late thirties, get to know each other at a party. They feel they like each other, the conversation and the time spent looking at each other confirm this. But each is a couple. What does the expression “remain faithful” mean, and at what point do we consider that we are cheating on the other? Are we not already a little “done” when we want to kiss the person? In Julie (in 12 chapters), by Joachim Trier, the two “magnets” who attract each other, but do not yet stick together, will invent a funny and risky game (brushing against each other without sex), going against the traditional approach of seduction. Revealed in Cannes in 2011 with Oslo, August 31, Joachim Trier and his co-scriptwriter Eskil Vogt draw an unexpected thread here on an a priori subject banal, that is to say the amorous and professional quest of an urban, free, connected thirty-something.
The fifth feature film by the Norwegian filmmaker stands out above all for its form. Here are discoveries of situations, raw and hard-hitting dialogues, a staging that allows itself to stop time – a few minutes that seem like an eternity – to make felt this strange sensation of the magic of a meeting. This feeling that the world around is stopped, to leave room for only two beings who forget the rest.
The twelve chapters give the female character time to evolve, while focusing on her sensations, little things on her face that seem to tell us: “This story is not the same”, or “This job is not for me”. We discover Julie before she turns 30, at the end of her medical studies, when she realizes that she does not like this job. She can obviously change, as her mother tells her, and find another way – psychology, photography… -, but until when? Without passing judgment, the director questions both sexual freedom and that of choosing one’s work, at least when one has the possibility and the means.
Tender card
Theater actress and already present in Oslo, August 31, Renate Reinsve carries with her something lunar, melancholy and luminous. Julie is realistic and open to the marvelous, which leads her, at a turning point in her life, to give up a man she loved more than anything, Aksel, a comic book author with sulphurous texts (rather unwelcome to the era #metoo), played by Anders Danielsen Lie, also starring inOslo… – it is also present in Bergman Island, by Mia Hansen-Love, another film in the competition. To see him grow old in this way, from film to film, and to hear him here accept his defeat with so much love and tenderness, is simply overwhelming.
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