Reprise (2006): A-

That rare debut in which self-conscious formal daring proves exhilarating rather than excruciating, Joachim Trier’s Reprise is a constantly fracturing wonder that finds exuberant expressiveness in its splintered structure. Trier’s film, set in Oslo, commences by imagining a potential bright future for writer best friends Phillip ( befuddled, morose Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (smiling, adrift Espen Klouman-Hoiner) right before they mail publishers their first manuscripts. No sooner has that reverie played out, however, than the film reverts to the present to concentrate – albeit with many fanciful detours – on their lives’ actual, less glamorous paths after Phillip has a breakdown following his book’s well-received publication and Erik learns his work will soon make it into print. Phillip and Erik’s brotherly relationship, their close bond with a diverse group of pals, and Phillip’s affair with beguiling Kari (Viktoria Winge) – which helped spur his psychosis – are depicted in Reprise with absorbing elation and misery, the film, an ecstatically unconventional coming-of-age story, intimately capturing the scraggly, tortuous means by which friendships and romances are born, develop, and die. Throughout, genuine and alternate realities freely commingle via jump cuts, flashbacks, flash-fowards, and scenes featuring dialogue heard over images of the speaker’s silent faces, Trier’s narrative driven by an invigorating associative arrangement in which events spur memories spur dreams spur realizations. It’s a dynamic wherein the past holds constant sway over both the here and now and the future, whether it’s Erik recalling a buddy’s misogynistic opinions as he attempts to dump his girlfriend, or it’s Phillip trying to literally recreate the past through a return trip to Paris with Kari. Complementing its postmodern configuration with an authorial narrator and allusions galore (to literature, punk rock, and cinema) that flirt with pretentiousness, Reprise has the air of a psychologically incisive novel, its aesthetic “prose” attuned to the ups and downs and back-arounds of love and friendship in a way so authentic and affecting that it winds up burrowing deep into one’s marrow.