Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Oslo, August 31st
2011 · Joachim Trier · Oslo, August 31st on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera stay close on Anders's hands and eyes. (camera)
Ihre's handheld camera tracks small movements of head, hands, and eyes in close-up, sometimes tipping into surveillance, then occasionally pulling back to place him in the city.
Payoff: The camera watches without interpreting, so what you read in him you have to find yourself.
Notice how warm and overexposed the daylight looks. (light)
Ihre shoots Oslo's stone and summer foliage in a light that is beautiful without being picturesque, gorgeous in almost every scene.
Payoff: The world looks inviting and Anders still cannot live in it. That gap is the film's quiet irony.
Notice that you never see Anders travel anywhere. (cutting)
Bugge Coutté cuts straight from one encounter to the next, skipping the walking and the waiting, so only the moments of attempted connection seem to count.
Payoff: The gaps the film throws away are the only time Anders isn't being asked to perform being alive. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). The reading calls these skipped stretches dead time: for Anders, the cut time is the only bearable time.
Listen for the overlapping voices in the opening. (sound)
Unnamed people recall their youth in Oslo over images of the city, laid on top of each other before you even meet Anders.
Payoff: The city becomes a surface holding a history it can no longer really give back to anyone. In the reading: the stratigraphic image. The reading calls this a stratigraphic image, a place carrying a past that the images can no longer fully hold.
Watch Anders's face go still instead of breaking. (performance)
Anders Danielsen Lie plays distress as stillness, not display. Small adjustments of posture stand in for the breakdown scenes the film never gives you.
Payoff: What he does not say gets carried by how he sits, stands, or holds his hands instead. In the reading: cinema of the body / the gest. The reading calls this the gest: meaning carried by posture and gesture rather than by what a character does.
Once you have seen it
Track the fragments of strangers' talk around Anders in the café. (cutting)
Bugge Coutté cuts between Anders listening and brief glimpses of other people's conversations, none of them completing, building a mosaic of ordinary life he can hear but not enter.
Payoff: Overhearing becomes the whole scene: proof that he can be surrounded by life and still not reach it.
Notice the silence in the family apartment at the end. (structure)
Photographs and furniture accumulate without comment, the record of a life Trier never explains, closing a day that opened with Anders trying to drown himself.
Payoff: The film ends in accumulation, not resolution, the same restraint it kept for ninety minutes.
Follow who sits, stands, or retreats to the kitchen with Thomas. (staging)
The long apartment conversation traces the shifting power between the two men entirely through where their bodies go, without a line of dialogue commenting on it.
Payoff: Thomas cannot rescue Anders because Thomas already made the compromises Anders refuses, and the blocking shows it before either man says it.
Carry this in: Watch what his body does instead of what he says. The whole film runs on a man who has stopped being able to act.