Elisabeth Donnelly

I wrote about why Joachim Trier’s films - Oslo, August 31st and Reprise - are just the best, for The Paris Review Daily. I also get a kick out of how the star of both films, Anders Danielsen Lie, is a doctor in real life, released a concept album about autism, is married to a supermodel, and the couple of films that he’s been in - including one he made as a ten year old that was nominated for an Academy Award - have done wonderfully. Do his friends hate him for being very successful at life?

For those who like to keep score (check Richard Rushfield’s “The Painfully Brief Candle of Modern Auteurs,” a totally fun theory) Trier is now two for two with great films, and I’m really curious as to whether he can keep it up - for two directors that I was very excited about at one point, Wes Anderson and David Gordon Green, their third film was where the seams started showing (Team Rushmore, less The Royal Tenenbaums), and they’ve been up and down ever since, one director sticking to a vision, the other… not. I think it’s different for foreign directors that can get arts funding, however.

I have slight issues with the use of the word “auteur” as an French, chic-sounding catch-all replacement for “film director,” as, contextually, Kael and Sarris-ly, at the least, it referred to seeing a director’s signature even in work-for-hire stuff, when it’s more used willy-nilly these days with relatively visionary directors of any stripe, including writer/directors. Kind of like the evolution of the word “peruse,” which I think means to read thoroughly and carefully in the OED and now is used for indicating that you flipped through something.

This week I had the pleasure of seeing Joachim Trier’s second film, Oslo, August 31st and reading The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits. They’re both worth seeking out. Oslo, August 31st is purposefully small, a day-in-the-life of a junkie, whereas The Vanishers is a batshit insane novel that’s fun to describe: when a woman gets physically attacked by her psychic mentor, she’s off on a journey to find out secrets about her dead mother. Or something. That’s actually an attempt to be succinct.

But what was funny about both works was that they were dealing with big topics - drugs and addiction, psychics and European spas (it’s a crazy book) - they were both very much fronts for what the artists were interested in. Oslo, August 31st feels very much a film about being in your thirties, as opposed to Reprise, which is one of the very best films about being in your twenties. The Vanishers is wrestling with grief through satire, with Sylvia Plath looming above everything as a benevolent ghost. It is also distressingly on target about the little wars that women wage with each other - sometimes the behavior is that of a psychic attack, but we ignore the wounds.

Oslo, August 31st may be a little bit of a masterpiece - it manages to take a selfish story and make it something about everybody, humanity, the pulse of a city. Anders Danielsen Lie is quite a good actor. There’s stuff happening on his face even when the scene is still. The Vanishers is definitely uneven, but fascinatingly so, and the writing is so good that you need a highlighter for certain sentences. It was a wonderfully maternal world, and I wondered whether Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry - or a female writing/directing team that I haven’t even heard of yet - could make a little bit of weird magic out of its words. It would be a dream, for sure.