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O' Horten
Fortgang
Given our ageing population, it may now be just a matter of time before gross-out comedies about horny teenagers are supplanted by whimsical dramas about ornery pensioners. Director Bent Hamer's O' Horten is a bone-dry, shaggy dog story about an elderly train driver discovering there's still light at the end of the tunnel. Like the work of fellow Scandinavian Aki Kaurism?ki (Lights In The Dusk) it's a film which occupies that strangely Scandinavian hinterland where moody melancholy rubs against the darkly absurd - an appropriate response, given that everyone here is moving towards the end of the line.
Odd Horten (Baard Owe) is the 67-year-old Norwegian loner who, having spent a quiet life on the rails, is now looking reluctantly towards retirement. With one more trip to make from Oslo to Bergen, he is honoured by his fellow railwaymen with a party. But Horten gets separated from his friends on the way back to someone's flat and eventually finds himself stranded in the bedroom of a small child - the only character here clocking in under 60.
The mistake prevents Horten from making that final run, and instead he bounces off on a strange and unexpected new trajectory that finds him losing his shoes in a sauna and staggering off in a pair of red high heels, then befriending a drunken diplomat (Espen Skj?nberg) who claims he can drive with his eyes shut - or he is actually a brilliant inventor driven mad by his own pathological shyness?
Hovering in the background is Horten's senile mother, who once dreamt of being a championship skier, and in the playfully droll yet gently sincere spirit which marks this film, Hamer dedicates O'Horten to his own mother "and all other female ski jumpers". It's an unlikely motif in a story that moves along at its own unhurried and pensionable pace but it eventually prompts Horten to make his own leap of faith - literally - in a quasi-fantastical climax which sees him strapping on his mother's ski's and soaring through the Oslo night towards a future which may or may not be for real.
For director Hamer, who cast Matt Dillon as 100 per cent proof poet Henry Chinaski (booze legend Charles Bukowski's alter ego) in the similarly dry - in one sense at least - Factotum from 2005, O'Horten is a small but perfectly formed fable which suggests you can seize the day even at twilight. The accumulation of elderly eccentrics and the sense of a story unfolding at the very edge of conventional realism are balanced by an altogether less fanciful acknowledgement that time, like O'Horten's own Oslo-Bergen express, isn't hanging around for anyone.
Pivotal to this is the doleful countenance of Baard Owe, who locates in Odd Horten an appealing combination of doleful resignation, reluctant generosity and guttering old-guy fire. Horten skimming on his ass down an ice-slicked street or ignoring an arrest in a bizarrely silent bar suggest an episode of 'Last Of The Summer Wine' rewritten by Samuel Beckett and then filmed by Jim Jarmusch. It's Owe's own face - open and empty, intent yet inert - which provides the depth to a film about an ordinary man in search of an extraordinary destiny, reached, it transpires, on those skis.
As has frequently been the case with Jarmusch - and for that matter Aki Kaurism?ki - the most intriguing aspect of O'Horten is also the most potentially troubling. When you start chasing dark reality with theatrical irony there's a danger you end up losing track of both. But Hamer maintains the balance, the rising tide of melancholy complemented rather than contradicted by a quiet sense of the ridiculous. Skilful control marks every stage of this enjoyably odd little film, right down to the touching, bittersweet conclusion.
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