(Actor Bard Owe in O'Horten, above, and director Bent Hamer, below.)
by Terry Keefe
Note: This article is currently appearing in this month's VENICE MAGAZINE.
Norwegian director Bent Hamer has just come back from a walk around the beach in Venice and eagerly relates, “I just saw this house on the beach and it had a sign which said, ‘Hippies, please use kitchen entrance!’” Hamer then laughs, captivated by this little glimmer of absurdity he has discovered. The sign in question actually wouldn’t be out of place in a Bent Hamer film, which are known for mixing visual oddities of the everyday with characters and plots which keep the overall film grounded in reality, somewhat anyway. We last spoke when he was releasing Kitchen Stories in 2004, the story of which was inspired by the real-life studies done by a Swedish kitchen appliance company in the late 1940s, specifically centering upon the journey of a Swedish researcher who is sent to live with an aging Norwegian bachelor to document his kitchen habits. One of the most memorable images from Kitchen Stories was the towering high chair that the researcher sits upon in the bachelor’s kitchen, to separate himself from his subject. At the same time, the plot movement focuses on the subject and researcher bonding, almost buddy-style, and it was this spine that allowed Hamer to simultaneously explore the inherent ridiculousness of kitchen research, without spinning off into total farce.
(The high chair in Kitchen Stories, below.)
Hamer’s newest feature film is O’Horten, which is essentially a character study about a recent retiree, a train engineer named Odd Horten (played by Bard Owe), who suddenly finds himself with too much time on his hands and falls into a series of minor misadventures, all with a slightly absurdist tinge. O’Horten is a sort of About Schmidt-style, coming-to-age tale, if it had been visualized by Magritte. O’Horten is marked by a number of striking images: a POV shot of someone going down a seemingly unmonitored ski jump at night; a businessman willingly sliding down an iced-over road because it is too difficult to walk on; and another POV shot from the engineer’s seat of a train going through a tunnel, amongst many others, and so it comes as little surprise that Hamer constructed his story with various images such as these in mind. Says Hamer of his scripting process, “It was very unlike Kitchen Stories, which was centered so much on a concept. With Kitchen Stories, I worked from the inside, to my way out, around a very focused idea. But this time, I had to piece it together, and I started from the outside with a lot of loose ends, and then tried to find the center. It was a very different approach for me, this writing. I didn’t always know where to go.” He then adds with a laugh, “Sort of like Odd Horten on his journey!"
Hamer’s last film, Factotum, was actually shot in the United States, starred Matt Dillon and Marisa Tomei, and was adapted from a book by Charles Bukowski. Although he appears to be very open to working here again, Hamer has also managed to develop a worldwide audience with largely character-driven films such as O’Horten, and Kitchen Stories, which have visuals and elements that feel very specific to Norwegian, or at least Scandinavian, culture. Some of my own pleasures derived from O’Horten included the travelogue-style elements of seeing what was unquestionably actual ice falling from the sky in several shots, and the different styles of dress, not to mention faces, in small-town Norway. There is a lesson here for filmmakers that all you need to find a large audience might already be in your backyard. Hamer nods vigorously when presented with this statement and expounds, “People talk about ‘big’ films. What is a ‘big’ film? There is some connotation there I don’t understand. What it’s all about is if you can recognize something which is universal and specific in a film. Of course, you can talk about pure entertainment, but hopefully there’s something more than that.”
O’Horten opens this month via Sony Pictures Classics.
O'Horten has great critic reviews, but low buzz
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