Oslo, August 31st

OSLO, 31. AUGUST is a portrait of contemporary Oslo. A visually striking and quietly shattering drama about a man in deep existential crisis. Anders will soon complete his drug rehabilitation in the countryside. As part of the program, he is allowed to go into the city for a job interview. But he takes advantage of the leave and stays on in the city, drifting around, meeting people he hasn’t seen in a long while. Thirty-four-year-old Anders is smart, handsome and from a good family, but deeply haunted by all the opportunities he has wasted, all the people he has let down. He is still relatively young, but feels his life in many ways is already over. For the remainder of the day and long into the night, the ghosts of past mistakes will wrestle with the chance of love, the possibility of a new life and the hope to see some future by morning. “Anders may be a middle-class kid who “fucked up” (as he puts it), but he’s also a product of the postmodern intellectual culture that offered specious justification for all-night parties and rampant drug abuse, with little concern for the aftermath. Yet Trier and his collaborators refuse to moralize excessively about Anders’ past — an all-night party ends with an impromptu bike ride through the city that suggests a post-rave “La Dolce Vita” and is, somehow, simultane ously anarchic, elegiac and tender. Ultimately the film is driven by the pathos of the reformed addict, whose only sense of himself is so linked to drugs and alcohol that he no longer knows who he is or was. This is a breathtaking, profoundly mature piece.”

Steve Gravestock, Toronto FF