O' Horten

I’ll tell you, at the rate I’m going with catching up on the movies we’ve played that I haven’t seen, I could almost start to develop an animosity toward English-language films. Looking down that list of films I’ve watched recently, there’s a lot of disappointing stuff in American - and a lot of really good stuff in languages other than American. (And yes, I know that American isn’t a langauge. I’m making fun of the jackoffs who think that there’s something wrong with you if your skin ain’t white and you don’t talk American.) The two best movies in that long list are both in English (Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker) - but the remainder of the top five would be foreign language films, and I have a feeling that most of the top ten would be filled out by films that ain’t in American.

O’Horten would be one of those, even if it does slip into standard convention at the very end, and even if its first little vignette is stronger than all of the rest that follow. It’s a Norwegian picture by Bent Hamer about a man called Odd Horten who has just retired as a locomotive engineer after forty years of service. He is fêted by his colleagues, but gets locked out of the building where the party is going to be and then climbs some scaffolding to try to get into the building. Instead, he winds up in some other family’s apartment and wakes their little boy, who wants to show Horten his car and then insists that Horten sit in a chair next to his bunk bed until he falls asleep. Of course, Horten falls asleep too, and then sneaks out of the house the next morning while the family is having breakfast. It’s an absurd little vignette, but it’s awfully funny, and even a little bit touching, trading on a classical innocence that doesn’t quite become naïvete.

The rest of the film is a rolling series of similar vignettes, ticked off in episodic fashion, though none of them are either as absurd or as funny as that first one. Horten pays a visit to his extremely elderly, nearly catatonic mother (who was once a ski jumper) and gives her some grapes, but she never speaks. There’s a story there, of course, but it’s not revealed until the end of the picture, and it is to Hamer’s credit (he also wrote the script) that he does not overdo it. The import of the story is poignant, and we get that - but he doesn’t rub our noses in it and make us wish that he had left it out. Later, Horten takes a sauna and falls asleep (again) and then goes skinny dipping when he wakes up, only to be interrupted by a couple with designs on a bit more than skinny dipping when they jump into the pool naked. Like in the scene when he stays overnight at the boy’s apartment, he manages to escape the pool unbeknownst to the others in attendance.

You could certainly argue that it is at least unlikely, and maybe even impossible, that he could make such an escape once - never mind more than once. You would probably be right, on a certain level; but that would be leaving out what Hamer might be trying to say about Horten and his place in the world, and what some of his really excellent compositions are trying to show. In a number of scenes (the sauna, and twice at a local pub), Horten is shown to be sitting off to the side, away from others. In the pub, he’s sitting in a seat tucked behind the front door. If you look at the door from inside the pub, you see Horten sitting immediately to the right of the door; but if you were to come into the pub and look around, you would miss him altogether. He is similarly situated in the sauna, all the way in the top corner, placed in such a way that he cannot physically be further removed from any other person in the room. The compositions make it clear that Horten, whether consciously or unconsciously, has distanced himself from everyone else. It’s a fish out of water story, but with a paucity of overt emotional intrigue and none of the self-importance of, say, a film like Forrest Gump.

It has some things in common with the 1994 Best Picture “winner,” but although Horten meets a lot of people under unlikely circumstances he’s not a walking tour of American (nor even of Norwegian) history - he’s just doing things he would not ordinarily have done due to having to be at work every day; and while the film certainly requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, it has a ring of authenticity to it that makes you feel like you’re having a yarn spun at you by someone who is awfully good at spinning yarns - and it doesn’t hurt that Baard Owe, as Horten, delivers such an understated, efficient performance. I thought bits of it were a little slow in the middle, but it works so well overall that I can’t really gripe about the middle bits.

Holds for one more week, on a limited schedule - so get out and see this one while you still can.