O’Horten (Bent Hamer, 2007): Norway, Germany, France

Reviewed by Chloe Seaman. Viewed at The Santa Barbara Film Festival. 

O’Horten is a funny and very odd story of a mans life after retirement, and is also Norway’s official submission to the foreign language Oscar. 

Odd Horten is a 67-year-old train engineer that starts out his retirement by meeting odd characters in surreal situations. Among others, Horten meets a crazy old man laying in the street one night that he helps get home. At the crazy man’s house, they begin to talk and the man convinces Horten to go for a drive early the next morning and the man will drive blindfolded. He insists that he is excellent at driving without seeing, but that it has been a while. So he and Horton wake up early and the man takes the wheel…blindfolded. Well, at an intersection the man becomes unresponsive and apparently dies. So Horten takes the man’s dog and walks off to discover new things.

There is no wonder why the main character’s name is Odd because everything in his life is just…well, odd. You never really got to know him as a character but it didn’t really matter because to see this quiet simple man in absurd situations was funny enough. There were a lot of long shots and scenes with little dialogue where you could just observe the characters. A lot of these scenes were a bit dull but some were pretty funny. There is one scene when Horten is swimming naked at night in a public pool when two giggling girls come into the pool. You see Horten swimming underwater in one direction, then the girls jump in the water near him and then (still from the same one camera angle) you see him swimming again underwater but in the opposite direction. There were no jokes being said and it was so simple but it made me laugh; and it was those simple scenes when you observed the characters that were funny.

Also, the whole movie took place at night, except for the beginning and ending which were daytime shots of a train going by. It’s interesting because the way it looks – being at night and having a darker mise-en-scene – it comes off visually as being a drama, but it really is a comedy. The music was a great addition to the mood of the film because it was so “light” and enhanced that it was in fact a funny movie. I guess the way it looks and the way it is portrayed, being so contradicting, is just another element that makes this film odd; but odd in the sense that it actually works for what the filmmakers were trying to achieve.

This was a film that definitely had funny moments, but there were also parts that were boring that made me momentarily forget about what was going on. I have mixed feelings on how much I liked it, but overall it was worth seeing.