Wonderful character development!

Fresh and Exciting

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Odd Horton is dependable and cautious Norwegian train engineer facing retirement. His fellow train workers throw him a big retirement party. He gets locked out of his own party and tries to sneak back in climbing up a scaffolding. He finds a boy who asks him to stay while he sleeps. He oversleeps and misses his train. It's a series of disjointed rambling situations leading him to reconsider his life. As a character, Odd Horten lacks any charisma. It starts off slowly. When it turns strange, the movie lost me. I would rather it go crazy. I couldn't really follow him down the rabbit hole. The movie is well-made and it aims to be profound. I don't hate the attempt but it's not for me.

O'HORTEN comes from Bent Hamer, the director of KITCHEN STORIES and FACTOTUM. I enjoyed both of those a great deal yet - story-wise - they had very little in common. One is about a project in Scandinavia to watch people in their kitchens 24 hours a day and determine how kitchens can be redesigned. One is about Charles Bukowski's life, focusing more on the comedic aspects but with a great sting in the tail. Given the difference in those two movies, don't bat an eyelid when you find out Hamer's latest is about a retiring train driver from Norway called Odd Horten.The movie starts with Horten driving the train swiftly through tunnels in a snow-filled landscape. He smokes his pipe and shows little emotion. The camera follows the train in and out of the tunnels, with that satisfying sound train-users will know. Horton barely speaks... in fact he barely speaks for the first half of the movie. He is given a retirement party and seems thoroughly embarrassed by it... especially by the little brass train statue and extended "choo-choo" salute that the other drivers give him. When the party moves to a guy's flat, Horten decides he needs some tobacco for his pipe. By the time he's returned, the door is accidentally locked and he needs to climb in through another window and gets tied up talking to a little kid. It's a strange scene, but a good introduction to the mood of the rest of the movie. Horten becomes caught up with the kid's need for someone to talk to. Much as he wants to get away, Horten eventually is drawn in due to politeness and, later, interest.Horten is a guy married to his job. Free of that, he's at a loose end and forced to figure out what he wants to do. Hell, life's train has passed him by... hence all those shots at the start of the movie. But, and this is the real strength of the movie, this is never bashed over the viewer's head. It comes across - while being consistently interesting throughout - as just a man getting up to interesting adventures. It never feels self-conscious. The movie ties together at the end, but you're not aware of it building in that direction.O'HORTEN reminded me of Jim Jarmusch, who gets this sort of realist movie - generally - spot on. Little happens in STRANGERS IN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW, but there are fascinating characters and situations. They're often wacky, but that wackiness is played straight and leads to some hilarious - and touching - moments. There's that moment in GHOST DOG when Ghost Dog's French pal takes him up to a roof and they look at a man building a boat on the top of an apartment block. The boat could never be lifted off there, the guy is just doing it for the satisfaction of knowing he can do it. Is that happening everywhere? No. But maybe there's someone doing it somewhere, and why not have it in a movie? Life is as dull as the scenes you pick.Odd Horten meets a bunch of interesting people and gets caught in interesting situations. Horten goes for a late night skinny dip in his local pool, but is disturbed by a couple of lesbians. Cue a hasty escape where the only shoes Horten can find are high heels. He even meets a guy who has driven blindfolded - perfectly - through city streets across the world. Would you believe the guy? Well, what better way to find out than going out on a trip with him? And Horten become increasingly inclined to finally see life rather than letting it pass him by.In the wrong hands, it could all come across as silly. But, after the initial surprise, it doesn't. In one scene, Horten goes to visit his very elderly mother. She sits silently in her chair - lost in her own world. At one stage, he mentions her ski-jumping skis in the corner of her room and a smile flickers across her face. She always wanted to be a ski-jumper as a kid, and it's only at that moment that the senility breaks and the woman comes through. And that's just one of a number of touching scenes in the movie. And, as through much of the movie, that mood is emphasised by some beautiful camera-work and scenes. They're frozen landscapes, with snow swirling in the wind.Baard Owe is wonderful in the lead role. It's always hard to judge the acting in foreign-language films because we can't tell if they're pronouncing the dialogue well. Apparently Bergman was never popular in Sweden until after his death, partly for that reason. English speakers often give a free pass to foreign movies, and often have to presume the acting is good. Well, Baard Owe is genuinely great in this one, and you can judge it fully because it's a largely silent performance. He runs a series of emotions with the slightest of movements, depicting a seemingly distant man with something simmering under the surface. The real Baard Owe is known for being an eccentric nut-job who sometimes wears tailored, slightly electrified suits that give you a shock if you touch him. So Owe really had to get in character for Odd Horten.O'HORTEN is a quiet movie. These types of movies are often called "gentle" but I think this packs more of a punch than that. And I think that's the big connection between all three of Bent Hamer's movies. They meander along, seemingly without direction, but they get somewhere great. If you're up for that kind of movie, this will fit the bill almost perfectly. Crack open a beer or some wine, and sink into it.

This film got me the same way that The Gods Must Be Crazy did, in that I watched a few minutes of it one day on the Cable channel, but turned off the television for something meaningful. Was I WRONG! As with The Gods Must Be Crazy, one day I watched it all the way through, and found it to be truly enjoyable.About this film, O'Horten, I have read other reviews and most of them got what I did out of it, oh, some things were different, but, something were also the same.As a fine watch is engineered and made to exacting standards, so was this film. Mr. Owe, as well as the others, did as he was hired to do, and he did it so very well.This film has a message in it that a lot of people today need to know about, it will do them some good.I remember thinking as Odd went into the restaurant and sat down, " there ARE still places out of the way like that where people function daily and contribute to the actions that must take place for things to go where they are meant to go."One warning, if you let it, this film will take you into it, and you will go from one scene to another as Odd does. Experience the music, atmosphere, the implied things, and all the other good that radiates from this film.I will very gladly watch this movie over and over again, anytime that I know it is being shown.To those who have read this review, I say, rent it if you can, or catch it on Sat or Cable, but do watch it.My thanks to all involved in the making of the film, Mr. Owe, you did a very fine job Sir.

In Norwegian director Bent Hamer's third film to be seen Stateside (following 'Kitchen Stories' and 'Factotum'), a man named Odd Horton (Baard Owe) retires after 40 years as a train conductor. His face is as wrinkled as scrunched-up parchment, but he's erect and vigorous enough. What the heck is he going to do now? Clair Denis' wonderful '35 Shots of Rum' (whose US release is coming later this year) also begins with the idea that without tracks and timetables to show him the way a railroad engineer who's put out to pasture may be particularly lost, as wage earners go, even desperate. Denis' is an ensemble film full of warmth and connectedness, but sad for the conductor. Horton, who's odd, alright, maintains a Nordic blankness we never penetrate, but -- sadly, it seemed to me -- his meanderings end happily enough. After enduring so much wry tedium one would like to have been rewarded with a little more pessimism.Because he's a solitary who keeps a bird in a cage, which he covers when he goes out, Horton gives a momentary hint of Alain Delon's lonely samurai in Jean-Pierre Melville's classic noir. One may also contrast Horton's dry world with the garish and curiously tonic pessimism of Islandic helmer Aki Kaurismaki, who concluded his "Loser Trilogy" with 'The Lights of the City,' which records the downfall of a pathetic loser who becomes a would-be gangster, an utterly failed samurai. Horton, perhaps unwittingly, flouts convention and even breaks the law. When he loses the way back to his retirement celebration he winds up breaking and entering, he flees from lesbian lovers who interrupt his midnight swim wearing the high heels of one of them, and he abandons a corpse in a car. To please his near-catatonic aged mother, whose only response when he visits her is a smile he does not see when he refers in leaving to her youthful prowess as a ski jumper, he steals a pair of old skis and for the first time in his life does some late night ski-jumping of his own. Earlier, he consents to ride with a very odd man (odder than Odd) who claims he knows how to drive blindfolded, again at night, in a classic Citroen DS.Some of the dry jokes seem gratuitous. Odd habitually dines alone in an old-fashioned restaurant. The cook is taken out in handcuffs by police and the waiter, a wrinkled-faced Buser Keaton type just like Horton, announces to the room, "Of course don't expect me to take any more food orders." What are we to make of the old man who keeps coming back into the tobacco shop to ask for matches, because he keeps losing them? At moments that might be stressful Horton, like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, takes out his pipe and lights it, or taps it on the bottom of his shoe. Bur Oslo is a whole galaxy away from the South of France.Hamer's film takes a long time to get started. In fact it's hard to say when it does begin. Many tedious long shots of trains, tracks, and snow have to be got through before Horton finally loses his way, and something begins to happen. Maybe it's when he oversleeps in a little boy's room and just misses his last train run, that we know his new life, or a transition into it, has finally begun. His decision to sell a boat leads to a long series of wild goose chases at an exaggeratedly Kafkaesque airport where he is repeatedly searched and run through scanners. Is Hamer comparing modes of transport, and suggesting the more old-fashioned ones are preferable? The railroad will work for 40 years, a Citroen is good for a deadly ride, a streetcar will do in a pinch, a boat was once okay -- but airplanes, never, ever? All of a sudden his adventures and misadventures are over, Horton's doffed his trainman's uniform, donned comfortable-looking civvies, and there he is, still in a train station, but settling down to a good life (for the first time, perhaps?) with a good woman. He seems to have replaced that spooky chirping bird with the dead man's cuddly dog.Hamer's episodic structure here might owe something to Swedish director Roy Andersson, whose 'You, the Living' I saw in Rome two years ago after its release in the film festival there. Andersson's elaborate set pieces, triumphant celebrations of gloom, sparkle and charm, however, while Hamer's mises-en-scene are relatively flat and conventional. A film like 'O'Horton' must repay patience; it is unwatchable without it. We are never allowed into the mind or emotions of its protagonist. The wry humor, the missteps that lead to reassuring choices, hardly justify the slow, uneven pacing. 'Factotum' remains Hamer's best effort so far. It doesn't go anywhere, but neither do the books of Charles Bukowski, from which it's drawn.