KARLOVY VARY IFF Official Competition
Portraits of artists young and old
The Norwegian and Polish Competition entries at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival both offer portraits of artists, though they could not be more different.
Reprise, by Norway’s Joachim Trier, examines the lives of two young aspiring writers, while Polish title Several People, Little Time looks at real-life Polish poet Miron Bialoszewski, who is older than Reprise’s two protagonists combined when we meet him.
Reprise, a 4 ½production sold internationally by Nordisk Film, could be dubbed a Jules and Jim for the current generation, though the similarities lie not so much in the story (even if it involves two artists and a girl) as in Trier’s ability to, like Truffaut, seamlessly blend the heedless energy of youth with its strong melancholy undercurrents.
The film includes explanatory voice-overs and sequences in black and white (some in Paris), and follows young friends Erik and Philip, both aspiring novelists. Only Philip will find initial success, but his euphoria is short-lived when an obsessive romance “triggers his psychosis” and he ends up in the hospital.
Their idol, novelist Sten Egil Dahl, now lives as a recluse in Oslo and his fate might foreshadow what a career in writing could do to the two young people and their relationships with friends and lovers.
Polish veteran director Andrzej Barański also examines literary creation and its influence on friendship in the Communist-era drama Several People, Little Time. The film focuses on the relationship between state-sponsored poet Miron Bialoszewski (Andrzej Hudziak) and his blind secretary and aspiring poetess Jadwiga Stańczak (Krystyna Janda).
They are a platonic couple – he is gay – but kibbitz more than most married couples. The TVP production offers us almost two hours of daily scenes from their lives, in all their wonderful simplicity as well as ugliness, in a saturated greenish-yellow visual palette reminiscent of the Berlinale entry Requiem [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hans-Christian Schmid
interview: Hans-Christian Schmid
interview: Sandra Hueller
film profile], which was also set in the 1970s and which is playing in one of the sidebars at Karlovy Vary.
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