Oslo, August 31st · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He walks into a forest lake at dawn with stones in his coat and lets himself go under. Then he surfaces. He climbs out, soaked, and the day just continues — there is an old friend to see, a job interview to sit through, a party where people will be glad, or pretend to be glad, that he came. Most films would make a failed suicide a hinge, the moment a life swings back toward living. Joachim Trier treats it as a Tuesday. Anders has reached for the one decisive act left to him, and even that did not resolve anything. What remains is the rest of the day.

That refusal to resolve is the whole film, and it is also the precise place where Gilles Deleuze located a break in what cinema could do. In the older cinema — Deleuze calls it the movement-image — a character perceives a situation and acts to change it: perception flows into action, action settles the situation, the cutting serves that chain. Someone is in danger; someone runs to the rescue. Around the middle of the twentieth century Deleuze watched that circuit snap. He called the wreckage the crisis of the action-image: characters who still perceive perfectly well but can no longer react adequately to what they see. Anders is a textbook case, except nothing about him reads like a textbook. He understands his situation with terrible clarity. He simply has no act that would change it. The interview fails not because he stumbles but because he cannot make himself pretend the work matters. Thomas cannot save him because Thomas has made the adult compromises Anders won't make. Each encounter — as in Malle's 'Le Feu Follet', the film from which Trier lifts his whole armature, the addict's last round of visits, the observational hush — produces not revelation but one more proof that nothing here is reversible.

When action drains out of a character, Deleuze says, something else floods in: time. The person stops being an agent and becomes what Deleuze names a seer — un voyant, a watcher and endurer rather than a doer. Watch how Anders Danielsen Lie plays it. There are no breakdown scenes. When Anders suffers his face does not contort; it goes still. The camera, handheld and pressed close in the manner Trier and Jakob Ihre inherited from the Dardennes of 'Rosetta', studies that stillness the way you'd study weather. This is what Deleuze meant by a cinema of the body: meaning carried not by what a character does but by posture, by attitude, by the way a man sits or fails to sit. In Thomas's apartment the whole shifting balance of the friendship is written in who stands, who retreats to the kitchen, who stays on the couch — a relation exposed as pure bodily arrangement, what Deleuze calls the gest.

The café is the film's center of gravity and its clearest gift to anyone learning to see this way. Anders sits and listens. Around him fragments of strangers' conversations weave and never complete, the room's ambient noise thickening into something like a score. He cannot enter any of it. Deleuze has exact words for a scene like this: a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign and a sonsign — an image in which there is nothing to do but look and listen, because no action is available. And something stranger happens here too. Anders grows still while the world keeps moving around him; ordinary life flows and he is the one fixed point it flows past — what Deleuze calls a movement of world, the dancer absorbed into the dance. The sound design earns all of it: diegetic, plausible, refusing to swell into the music that would tell us how to feel. Cassavetes built the tables of 'Faces' out of exactly this — talk as mutual unintelligibility rather than exchange — and Trier runs the current straight into Anders.

Notice what Olivier Bugge Coutté's editing throws away. We never see Anders travel between places; we arrive with him, already there. The connective tissue — the walking, the waiting — is cut out, and Deleuze has a name for the stuff that's usually cut and here is sometimes left whole: dead time, temps mort, the stretches where nothing advances. The irony is that for Anders the so-called dead time is the only bearable time; it's the encounters that kill. His drift through a summer Oslo, warm and faintly overexposed and gorgeous, is the voyage-balade Deleuze diagnosed in modern cinema — the trip that transforms nothing. Antonioni had taught film how to turn a place into estrangement, how an empty terrace or a figure at the far edge of frame could carry psychology better than a line of dialogue; 'L'Avventura' is in the bones of these wandering sequences. The city is radiant and Anders cannot live in it. That is the film's quiet cruelty: this is an any-space-whatever, space emptied of its job as a stage for action and left to hold pure feeling instead.

Even the opening belongs to this grammar. Over archival images of Oslo across decades, unfixed voices recall their youth — a collective past spoken over a place that no longer holds it, the kind of stratigraphic image where landscape becomes the surface of an absent history. Bresson's country priest, writing down a life his failing body can't otherwise express, is the model for the interiority Trier keeps just out of reach.

What did this film do to film? It proved, late and in a minor key, that the most devastating drama can be built entirely out of a man who cannot act — that you can hold an audience for ninety minutes on indeterminacy alone, on a day that is, provisionally, every reason to stay and no reason that holds. Deleuze gives you names for what you're already feeling. The film gives you the face going still, and trusts you to watch it. Watch it again, and watch his hands.