Bent Hamer (2007)

In the recent Wendy and Lucy, the protagonist’s only friend was her dog and that friendship wasn’t allowed to last.  In the Norwegian film O’Horten, the eponymous Odd Horten (I assume the ‘O’ in the title refers to the first name initial and that the apostrophe is how this would be shown in Norwegian) gets the girl and the dog.  More precisely:  at the end of the picture, Odd, a recently retired train driver, is set to embark on a new life with Svea, an elderly woman at whose boarding house he has stayed over the years; and he’s inherited a dog, Molly, as the result of a chance encounter which has transformed his outlook on the world. Like Wendy and Lucy, O’Horten is getting some favourable reviews and arthouse bookings.  Unlike Kelly Reichardt’s film, which was driven and constrained by a grimly determined miserabilism, Bent Hamer’s piece is benign and sentimental – and the latest example of what films not in the English language can get away with in this country.  Even more miniaturist than Wendy and Lucy, O’Horten is much more likeable – and a better film.  But it’s likely that if it were American (or British) it would need to be as glum as Reichardt’s girl-loses-dog picture in order to be acclaimed.

Odd is about to retire after nearly forty years of driving trains to and from Oslo and Bergen.  A pipe-smoking bachelor, he shares his small, neat Oslo apartment with a pet bird.  The taciturn Odd doesn’t waste words even on the bird but he’s quietly attentive to its needs, carefully covering the cage when he goes out to work.  (Other than in Carry On At Your Convenience, how often has a caged bird in a film not been symbolic of something?)   He spends a night at Svea’s boarding house in Bergen shortly before his last day of work and, on the eve of his retirement, he’s presented by his workmates with a gold watch equivalent:  the silver locomotive.  Notoriously unsociable, he’s persuaded to follow some of the others to the apartment of one of their number.   He can’t get the security code on the door to work, climbs up some scaffolding and ends up in a different apartment, where a young boy asks Odd to stay until he falls asleep.  Odd obliges, oversleeps, escapes next morning without being noticed by the boy’s family but arrives too late for what would have been his last day’s work on the trains.

In the days following his retirement, we see Odd visit his serenely senile mother in a nursing home, meet up with a man about selling his boat (named Vera – for his mother), buying a new pipe and learning that the owner of the shop, whom he’s known for half a century, has died.  Odd goes for a late-night sauna and swim (he used to swim with the tobacconist); and, on the way home, meets up with the crucial character of Sissener.  Odd finds him lying in a drunken heap in the centre of Oslo and accompanies him back to Sissener’s house, which is where we first meet Molly, the dog.   As he and Odd chat (and Odd comes cautiously out of his shell in reminiscing about his own past), Sissener claims to be a retired diplomat and talks about his younger brother, a brilliant inventor who died too young.  (It transpires that Sissener is himself the inventor – the supposedly late brother, whom Odd meets subsequently, is the diplomat and the owner of the house.)  Sissener also claims to be able not only to see with his eyes closed but also to drive in that condition.  Early next morning, he takes Odd for a blindfold spin round Oslo.   While they’re stopped at a red light, Sissener dies, instantly and silently.

Although these episodes don’t build in terms of dramatic or character development, they do in thematic terms:  they bring Odd into closer proximity to death.  It’s pretty obvious from the striking title sequence (let alone the basic storyline) that this is going to be central to the film.  During the opening credits, we enter – from Odd’s perspective at the controls of his train – dark tunnels.  Their blackness is interrupted by the train’s emerging each time into a snow-covered landscape but the tunnels seem nevertheless to dominate increasingly.   There’s an immediate sense of time running out, of possibilities closing off.   But O’Horten is essentially a never-too-late heartwarmer.  When Odd talks to his silent mother in the nursing home, he picks up a photograph of her as a young woman in skiing gear – and it’s when he mentions ski-jumping to Vera that we see from the look on his face that this is the one thing he hopes she might be responsive to.  In conversation with Sissener, who has skiing equipment at his home, Odd confesses that he never dared to ski-jump and that he knows this disappointed his mother.

It’s a safe bet from this point onwards (and a certainty after Sissener pegs out) that Odd will change his ways.  He climbs to the take-off platform of the ski-jump, where he sees a young woman – presumably a vision of his mother as she once was.  He has in his pocket a rock that he got from Sissener – not, as Sissener has explained, just any rock but a fragment of a meteorite which began its journey to Earth 3.7 billion years ago.  When Odd says it’s funny to think the object has ended up in his home, Sissener says he’s missing the point.  The piece of rock hasn’t ended up anywhere – in its long journey through time, it will go on to somewhere else.   The fear of ski-jumping is of course symbolic of Odd’s generally timid approach to life – it signals that he’s never really lived.  In the best tradition of Hollywood deathbed conversions, once he’s made the jump he’s lost entirely his fear of living and daring.  The moment of the ski-jump is lovely and affecting as Odd looks down at the pinpricks of light in the dark city below.  As the jump happens, Bent Hamer cuts to darkness and then reprises the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel image.  Hamer cuts again to a high-level shot of a train travelling in the clear light of day, and looking to gather speed.    Then Odd gets off the train with Molly.  Svea is there to greet them on the platform.  (I’m not sure what happened to the budgie, if that’s what it was, unless I missed that he was carrying a cage too.)

When their conversation turns to ski-jumping, Odd explains to Sissener that, for all her ability, his mother wasn’t allowed to do the sport competitively because she was a woman.  There’s a dedication at the end of the film:  ‘To the memory of my mother – and all other women ski-jumpers’.  This suggests that the material has real personal meaning for the writer-director but O’Horten comes over as (successfully) ingratiating, sentimental whimsy rather than a work of emotional truth.  Odd’s timidity is never really explained (and, when we see him with Svea right at the start, they’re evidently happy in each other’s company).  The humour is distinctive but its visual delivery is mostly so leisurely that it doesn’t surprise and delight in the way that the glancing, understated gags of a film like Local Hero do.   It’s much more akin to the humour of Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without A Past, which was also (over-)praised for its deadpan eccentricity.  When, at Odd’s retirement dinner, his colleagues all stand and go into a group impression of being trains, the routine is a little too extended and self-consciously off-the-wall – less funny than it might have been with a truly light touch.

Other jokey bits are accompanied by music which underlines the humour too deliberately.  (The main theme of the score, by John Erik Kaada, is charming and effective in its wistful simplicity.)   And there are comical situations which Odd gets into – finding himself in the wrong apartment, getting arrested at an airport, bathing nude and hiding from two young lesbians who are doing the same – which seem to be no more than comedy set-pieces:  they don’t seem to connect to the main theme and certainly don’t add to our understanding of Odd.  He’s such a notoriously cautious and narrowly competent individual that the sequence of embarrassing positions he gets himself into isn’t really convincing.  (It’s not believable, for example, that a man who’s so modest that he keeps pulling a curtain across to shield himself from view during a semi-strip search at the airport would go skinny-dipping in a public place, even if he did think he’d be undisturbed there.)

As Odd, Baard Owe is very engaging – it’s a relaxed, empathetic performance, self-confident in its restraint.  Owe was seventy when he played the part:  one of his colleagues remarks that Odd looks good for his age (sixty-seven) and so does Owe.  He seems innately, easily humorous in a way that eludes the director but Hamer certainly got it right when he cast Owe (who, according to Wikipedia, has never had the lead in a film before).  His good looks and gentlemanly quality give Odd an air of distinction.  (The fact that Odd finds it difficult to shed his train driver’s uniform – and that Owe wears it well – strengthens the effect.)   This saves the film from condescension – prevents it from seeming to be about a little man.  Espen Skjønberg as Sissener gives a much more theatrically conventional performance but it’s needed, in order to liven up the proceedings.  Three senior actresses make a strong impression in their small parts:  Ghita Nørby as the tobacconist’s widow; the tall, wry Henny Moan as Svea; and Kari Loland as Odd’s mother.  (His vision of her as a young woman is played by Anette Sagen, a well-known professional ski- jumper.)

12 May 2009