An observant comedy of retiring minds
By Tom Long
Detroit News
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.02.2009
Pointedly strange and whimsical, "O'Horten" mixes the surreal with the mundane in its depiction of the retirement and eventual rebirth of a train engineer.
No, it's not sexy at all, but it is oddly delightful.
And the word "odd" is key here, being both the tone of the film, which opens Friday at the Loft Cinema, and the first name of its central character. Odd Horten, at the age of 67, is retiring as the film begins from a life of driving trains about Norway.
Played with enormous deadpan control by Bard Owe, Odd is a solitary sort. He lives in a small apartment with a parakeet, he visits his pleasantly mute mother weekly, his life seems to have been on a precise schedule forever.
But now that schedule has come off its tracks. And Odd seems surrounded by examples of how abnormal the normal world can be.
From his awkward retirement party — engineers sit about and try to identify trains from the sounds they make — to the simple act of having a beer in a local cafe (where police come in and arrest the cook), everything seems vaguely wrong.
Writer-director Bent Hamer (and you could make something of his first name as well) starts subtly and then steadily turns up the absurdity as the film progresses, until businessmen are nonchalantly gliding downhill while seated on a street of ice and a meteor millions of years old has somehow landed in Odd's pocket.
At times it feels indulgent — Odd wanders around an airport tarmac while looking for someone to sell a boat to, all to no apparent purpose — but for the most part Hamer moves his docile, perplexed character toward . . . something.
"O'Horten" is about how we identify ourselves, how we become prisoners of routine and about the value of breaking such routine. But it plays as observant comedy, never veering toward heaviness.
Still, there's a real force to the driver's-eye view of a train entering a tunnel, then emerging into daylight, only to enter a tunnel and emerge again and again. The movie begins and ends this way. Then again, don't we all?
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