oslo by way of joachim trier, or the disappearance of a city through trier’s “oslo” trilogy
what is time anyway, but a reminder of what we’re capable of building and then losing? there is only so much we can do to grasp onto the things that matter. and yet we do our best anyway.
inasmuch as films can be letters and conversations with the places and conditions that form us, joachim trier’s films are odes to holding steadfast to the slow disappearance of one, of being at a standstill while the rest of the world moves every cruelly onward.
trier’s characters ruminate in their grief and overhanging solitude, the ever-evolving city of oslo as their steady background. the trilogy’s a collection of montages tracking the disappearance of an old city — -or at least the knowledge of it in a generation’s collective memory — -through its characters’ gradual loss of various things: their hope, their youth, their grasp of life.
and yet there’s something so comfortably human in our propensity for regress; we are always falling off-course, eventually into collision with each other. we are always bandaging our many wounds, we are always picking up after ourselves. this is the great irreparability of humanity. this is the great story of humankind.
