Anders Danielsen Lie and Malin Crepin (Strand Releasing)

It begins with the words “I remember.” Unseen narrators recall moments of daily life as footage from the past and present city flash by: a quiet Oslo, a busy Oslo, a summer Oslo, a snowy Oslo. Finally, destruction: a building implosion, and darkness. What the mind remembers, and how the mind processes the lives we live, colors the way we live our lives. Unfortunately, the black dog that accompanies addiction too often overwhelms the light.

When we meet Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), he opens up the window of his room at a rehab center, framing the outside world in the windowpane in much the way Anders’ troubled mind frames his own life. But does he let in enough light to overcome the darkness? Oslo, August 31 looks at a single day in the life of a recovering drug addict, as the sun rises and falls on his attempt to let some light in.

The opening sequence of memories doesn’t reveal anything momentous, just the normal stuff of life. But for some people even that is challenge. Joachim Trier’s quietly beautiful second feature conveys how life is a struggle for its anti-hero, but the film, with its sensitive lead performance by Lie, reveals enough of Anders’ character that you believe in him more than he does.

Anders is on leave from rehab center outside Oslo to have a job interview at a news magazine. Riding in a cab, he emerges from a tunnel into the city, full of cranes and the promise of rebuilding. He spends the day trying to reconnect with old friends and just to connect, but he can’t let go of what holds him back: himself.

(Strand Releasing)

Trier was heavily influenced by French director Robert Bresson, who looked at suicide in a number of his films. Andres struggles with self-worth and self-doubt, and an American movie would play up a puppy dog vulnerability, but Lie manages to make Anders sympathetic without being pathetic.

The film is inspired by a French novel of the 1930s that was previously adapted by Louis Malle as The Fire Within (1961). That film was about an alcoholic, but Trier found something universal in the story, and there is a universal element in the memories of Oslo that open the film as a kind of point-counterpoint. Trier and Lie have a compassion for the struggling Anders but are not sentimental. In a scene where Anders, in the mood to give up on his own life, listens attentively to the ordinary conversations around him, you sense his need to connect and belong, and Lie’s expressive face conveys the loneliness and self-doubt in a modestly heartbreaking way.

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Oslo, August 31
Directed by Joachim Trier.
Written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, based on the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.
With Anders Danielsen Lie, Hans Olav Brenner, Ingrid Olava.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.
Running time 95 minutes
Not rated
Opens today at West End Cinema.