O’Horten
Directed by Ben Hamer
Runtime: 90 min.
O’Horten, writer/director Bent Hamer’s follow-up to his adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, is an oddly satisfying mix of that earlier film’s thorny matter-of-factness with a new kind of cozy, sometimes almost twee, sense of humor. In it, Odd Horten (Bard Owe), a recently retired train conductor, wanders through several unconnected encounters on his way to accepting his newfound obsolescence.
Horten’s a funny old man—but not in a cute kind of way. Hamer treats him with a steely serenity that infuses the absurdity of his adventures—breaking and entering, lesbian skinny-dippers and a balaclava-clad corpse—with pervasive deep-seated loneliness. Supporting characters appear and disappear without ceremony or explanation, making O’Horten’s kind of magical realism cagily charming.
That admirable sense of mystery to Horten’s character comes at a price. Hamer refuses to fully breach the distance he creates from Horten out of deference to his “outsider” nature, as Trygve Sissener (Espen Skønberg), a new friend of Horten’s, puts it. Sometimes Hamer respects his protagonist too much to provide more than just a faux-prickly sense of comfort, as when he’s talking with his hospitalized mother (Kari Lolland).
In the scene, Horten makes small talk patiently and with genuine warmth while Hamer shows her unresponsive face in close-up, relating Horten’s frustration only indirectly through mute images. In doing so, Hamer impresses us less with his ability to make Horten a sympathetic character through our ability to associate with him but rather our inability to make a direct connect with him, wistfully leaving him “misunderstood” to the end.
This is the unavoidable but relatively minor down side to Hamer’s double-edged technique. He succeeds in keeping Horten’s emotional responses so stoic that his emotions are projected onto everyone and everything but him, including a devastating lingering shot of his birdcage after he places a blanket over it and his canary subsequently becomes eerily quiet. The details of his activities effectively become his feelings, making his chance encounter with Sissener and later his brother Steiner (Kai Remlov) painfully earnest without being excruciatingly plodding or obvious. Events unfold at an unfathomably cool pace, making Horten a comfortably numb cipher.
