The time for self-creation

For all their emphasis on the youth market, American movies have never done a good job of portraying actual youth. The idea that young equals dumb prevails -- never mind that it's about the only time in life when reading Foucault or sitting through a Tarkovsky double feature is a viable task. What Hollywood tends to ignore is perhaps the central project of late adolescence and early adulthood -- the avid, voracious creation of identity through books, movies, music and cultural hero-worship.

Norwegian director Joachim Trier's inspiring first feature "Reprise" joyfully tackles the process of self-creation, as well as the friendships that feed and sustain it. He captures, in a way that's cool and romantic and heady, the moment in life when nothing matters more than ideas, influences and the possibility of shaping one's life into a work of art.

"Reprise" is the story of Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner), two friends who finish writing their first novels and mail them off together from the same mailbox. In their shared fantasy, which Trier tells in an artful, narrated fast-forward catapulting fashion, both books get accepted for publication. Low sales and cult authorship follow, along with tragic romances and moody trips to Paris. Then an accidental reunion, a cowritten project that sets off revolutions in faraway countries and draws the ire of religious leaders, a changed world.

Of course, none of this happens, at least not in the way Phillip and Erik imagine. Phillip's book gets published and Erik's does not, but it is Erik who survives this particular calamity. Phillip's sudden minor celebrity triggers a psychotic episode and, within six months, their world looks very different from the one they had imagined.

"Reprise," whose title is a play, I suppose, on the tendency in youth to play life out in the imagination as it plays itself out at a snail's pace in real life, uses things like possibility and projection into the future in the same way other films experiment with time. Unrealized potential plays a major part in the story, which is both propelled and haunted by what could have been, might have been, should have been, wasn't.