Reprise and Remonstrance, or, Two Movies Far More Interestesting Than Their Titles

The Norwegian director Joachim Trier's Sad Young Literary Men movie Reprise, opening in a couple weeks, is a terrific, bipolar movie about creative exhilaration and self-doubt; it's full of heady references and camaraderie, makes a full-frontal and self-aware assessment of the myth of the self-destructive artist, and is as good as any movie I've ever seen about the way groups of young dudes circle up, grab ideas by the tail and swing them about their heads in an effort to establish primacy in their group and ward off any girl that might expose their insecurities. Trier will be on hand for an advance screening of Reprise (his debut film) tonight at the Walter Reade: he'll answer questions afterward.

He'll also be sticking around to introduce the evening's next screening: as it happens, his grandfather Erik Løchen was perhaps Norway's premier modernist filmmaker, and his Remonstrance is included in the WRT's ongoing 1968: An International Perspective series. Dig the description:

The story of a film crew trying to make a political film, Remonstrance... captures the posing and grandstanding that sometimes accompanies political discussions around correct form in art, but Løchen goes his characters one better. He designed Remonstrance so that its five reels could be shown in any order, rendering 120 possible versions of the film.