O’HORTEN
Written, Produced & Directed by Bent Hamer
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
Norwegian with English subtitles
Norway/Germany/France. 90 min. Rated PG-13
With Bard Owe, Bjorn Floberg & Espen Skjonberg
 

There was a time when Scandinavian films were dark, philosophical meditations steeped in long winters. Now the climate seems to be driving people there stir crazy. However, O’Horten stays on the sunny side while its main character takes planes, trains, automobiles, boats, and skis from Oslo to northern Norway and back.

Trains have been central to the life of Odd Horten (Bard Owe) for the 40 plus years he’s been an engineer. He lives next to the tracks, keeps time by the trains’ comings and goings, and socializes with colleagues whose idea of entertainment is to identify the distinctive whistles of locomotives. (I used to work for a railroad, and the film’s take on that skill is barely satirical.) But Odd’s being retired and all the honors and hale hearty parties can’t fill his schedule.

Unlike writer/directer Bent Hamer’s Kitchen Stories, which found the humor in two stationery guys looking at each other in one room, Hamer first takes Odd on what could be called a post-retirement busman’s holiday, where Odd rides the rails up front and visits with the younger engineers. Feeling redundant and with no timetable to follow, he later sells his fishing boat, but he’s like a sailor who can’t find his land legs, getting a panic attack at an airport, and, even worse, left stranded on the train platform. There’s a lot of puns on how Odd’s name is common in Norway but a joke to other nationalities (and even Irish-ized into O’Horten). He has funny extended encounters with children and then with an old eccentric world traveler, Trygve Sissener (Espen Skjonberg), who insists he has second sight and can drive a car with his eyes closed: “It’s a beautiful day for driving blind!”

The sprightly electronica score by Kaada and the cinematography of John Christian Rosenlund, who also worked with Hamer on the far more surreal Factotum, fill in the gaps between these idiosyncratic characters and odd situations, with lots of snowy landscapes/cityscapes, starry skies, and endless tunnels and tracks. Hamer dedicates the film “In memory of my mother and all other female ski jumpers,” but by the time Odd finally appreciates how his mother, now with Alzheimer’s, took flight in her youth, his challenge to gravity feels like an added caboose to this rambling story.

Sharing a deadpan humor with Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s Man Without A Past, O’Horten is charming and beautiful looking. But it offers just another mode of transportation for a stubborn old guy lurching through a series of unscheduled stops while finally learning to live, like David Lynch’s The Straight Story, Michael Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues from Germany, and the Argentinean hitchhiker in Carlos Sorín’s Bombón: El Perro. Nora Lee Mandel
May 22, 2009