28th November 2009 00:00:00
O' Horten
Capsule Review
Anyone who has seen Norwegian director Bent Hamer’s delightful Kitchen Stories will know what to expect here in O’ Horten, although anyone with a taste for generally bleak, low-key, and gently surreal Scandinavian comedies, be it Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismaki, will find themselves on familiar ground not only with regards to the tone, but also Hamer’s off-centre look at life. Anyone else will have to adjust their expectations of what a film drama should be, but should find the experience nonetheless rewarding.
Essentially, O’ Horten is about an old man’s attempts to come to terms with retirement, but within that not initially attractive premise, director Bent Hamer has many wonderful and gently funny observations to make about this strange thing called life. Odd Horten (that’s his name) is a train driver who has reached retirement age after 40 years of service. Seen at the start of the film driving one of his final journey’s up through the snow-covered land to the north of the country, the image is firmly established (for this is in the style that Bent Hamer works) that O’ Horten’s life has been similarly direct, going from one place to the next along a straight line, with little surprises along the way (other than perhaps the odd moose getting onto the tracks). What happens however when you no longer have a steady pace and track laid out for you to follow?
Well, inevitably, for an old-man in changing worlds, it’s going to be a strange place that remind Horten of the disappointments and failures that have marked out his life, but encounters with one or two people of around the same age show that things could have been much worse. Unlike Roy Andersson however, Hamer’s work has a deeper human element and is much more than a series of eye-catching images, and his love for these quirky characters of a bygone age shines through. The unusual encounters and incidents that ensue only emphasise with touching sensitivity that requires no great amount of dialogue to explain, the delicacy of human interaction, the fleetingness of moments, and how wonderful and strange they can be in the larger scheme of things. Like the piece of meteorite that has fallen to earth after 4.7 billion years, it doesn’t mean that the journey ends there.
The Disc: Not unexpectedly, Artificial Eye’s presentation of the film is about as good as it could possibly be in Standard Definition DVD. The wonderful lighting and colouration of the film is highlighted with a clean, crisp image that handles the predominance of dark and night-time scenes with relative clarity and fine detail. Then image is wonderfully stable and fluid with no evident enhancement, noise reduction or compression artefacts. The audio is also superbly handled, with a stereo and a surround track, the 5.1 mix in particular highly impressive in its presentation of John Eric Kaada’s excellent score and the thunder of railway sounds that accompany many of the scenes. Subtitles are optional in a white font. Extras are mostly interview-based, giving a good account of the making of the film and the themes that the director is working with.
Essentially, O’ Horten is about an old man’s attempts to come to terms with retirement, but within that not initially attractive premise, director Bent Hamer has many wonderful and gently funny observations to make about this strange thing called life. Odd Horten (that’s his name) is a train driver who has reached retirement age after 40 years of service. Seen at the start of the film driving one of his final journey’s up through the snow-covered land to the north of the country, the image is firmly established (for this is in the style that Bent Hamer works) that O’ Horten’s life has been similarly direct, going from one place to the next along a straight line, with little surprises along the way (other than perhaps the odd moose getting onto the tracks). What happens however when you no longer have a steady pace and track laid out for you to follow?
Well, inevitably, for an old-man in changing worlds, it’s going to be a strange place that remind Horten of the disappointments and failures that have marked out his life, but encounters with one or two people of around the same age show that things could have been much worse. Unlike Roy Andersson however, Hamer’s work has a deeper human element and is much more than a series of eye-catching images, and his love for these quirky characters of a bygone age shines through. The unusual encounters and incidents that ensue only emphasise with touching sensitivity that requires no great amount of dialogue to explain, the delicacy of human interaction, the fleetingness of moments, and how wonderful and strange they can be in the larger scheme of things. Like the piece of meteorite that has fallen to earth after 4.7 billion years, it doesn’t mean that the journey ends there.
The Disc: Not unexpectedly, Artificial Eye’s presentation of the film is about as good as it could possibly be in Standard Definition DVD. The wonderful lighting and colouration of the film is highlighted with a clean, crisp image that handles the predominance of dark and night-time scenes with relative clarity and fine detail. Then image is wonderfully stable and fluid with no evident enhancement, noise reduction or compression artefacts. The audio is also superbly handled, with a stereo and a surround track, the 5.1 mix in particular highly impressive in its presentation of John Eric Kaada’s excellent score and the thunder of railway sounds that accompany many of the scenes. Subtitles are optional in a white font. Extras are mostly interview-based, giving a good account of the making of the film and the themes that the director is working with.
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