by Gaby Wood
The flat-fronted buildings in the Grunerlokka District of Oslo, where the actor Anders Danielsen Lie and the model Iselin Steiro live, are crisp, stately and designed for sunlight. They were built in the late 19th century for workers in the factories along the Akerselva river. Then, people slept 10 to a room. Now the area has become establishment-hip, and the facades have been painted a range of powdery shades: pale peach with a light gray and a dark gray stripe; faded mustard; dusky rose; Wedgwood blue with black window frames. The effect is striking — half severe and half serene, as if the colors of the South of France had hit an iceberg.
When I mentioned to Steiro how lovely I found the streets, she wrinkled her nose. “Really?” she asked. “I always think Stockholm and Copenhagen are so much nicer.” Lie nodded: “Oslo is more barbarian — in every sense.”
Meet Oslo: a city with a long-held inferiority complex and the central character in Joachim Trier’s devastating and beautiful film “Oslo, August 31st.” The movie, an updated city symphony disguised as gritty realism, was acclaimed at Cannes and Sundance, has had a very successful run in France and will be released in the United States on May 25. It is both a portrait of a man in difficulty — a recovering drug addict played astoundingly by Lie — and a hymn to a capital in flux. At parties, in parks, in restaurants and in the homes of friends, Oslo offers glimpses of something like redemption. Although the film takes place over the course of 24 hours, the title is not the date on which the action unfolds but the date on which it ends. The dawn rises, the film closes, and its title becomes less a setting than a form of punctuation: a bearer of history, a monument to a moment.
“I wanted to try to capture part of the melancholy of the change of a city,” Trier told me.
“We wanted to say: What’s the anxiety of this generation? Norway has not been affected that badly by the recession yet, and there’s a strange feeling of hope and expansion. But I also see a lot of hip, young, creatively ambitious people getting quite lost.” The film is loosely based on the 1930s French novel “Le Feu Follet,” made into a movie by Louis Malle in 1963, and Trier feels that what’s happening in Oslo now is similar to the social change in Paris during those two periods.
Trier and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt, wrote the script with Lie in mind. (He also played a central figure in their previous film, “Reprise,” about two troubled young novelists.) Trier compares him to Daniel Day-Lewis, a cerebral actor whose face leaves you guessing at what he’s grappling with, and “Oslo, August 31st” rests entirely on the richness and unpredictability of Lie’s performance. He can seem like both a child and a madman, becomes genuinely more intriguing as the plot progresses, yet remains unknowable to the end.
Steiro and Lie, who met in 2007 and married soon after (“I just diffused into your life,” Steiro said, laughing in Lie’s direction), are part of the group of gifted 20- and 30-somethings Trier described. On one wall of their light-flooded apartment is a set of Polaroids from Lie’s 30th birthday party three years ago; many of the people in them are recognizable from “Oslo, August 31st” and “Reprise.”
Steiro, who comes from a small town in the Arctic, has been modeling since she was discovered in London at 14. (She is now 26.) Glamorously severe in photographs, in person she has a charismatic touch of goofiness. Although still very recognizable from Chloé ads, among others, she’s taking a break to go to architecture school.
Lie, the Oslo-raised son of a doctor and an actress, made a childhood foray into acting that yielded “Herman,” a movie about a boy who goes bald that became such a hit it almost put Lie off for good. So now he is finishing his medical internship at a hospital two hours away. His friends describe him as a renaissance man, but that’s a fairly bland summation of the strange span of his gifts. He’s an actor, he’s a doctor, he has released a rock album (“This Is Autism”) based on recordings he made as a child. His affect is so deadpan that it would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which his smile transforms his face. It’s memorable when it happens in the movie, and in life Lie’s solemnity tends to crack in response to Steiro, who is fiendishly friendly, a perfect foil.
Late one Sunday morning, they took me to Kaffebrenneriet in the upscale Frogner district, and persuaded me to try the local geitost, a brown goat cheese that tastes like caramel. (“Even in Sweden they’re like: ‘What?,’ ” Steiro said.)
Lie returned to his joke about Oslo being “barbarian,” and explained that although Norway boasts Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch and the best-selling thriller writer Jo Nesbo as native sons, it has been slower than Sweden or Denmark to put itself center-stage culturally. “Whenever there’s a discussion about a new museum for Edvard Munch, who is probably the best thing we have, there’s a lot of debate about how much to spend,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Whereas if Norway’s going to have another winter Olympics, we don’t talk so much about price.”
The couple then spoke about the effect on the city of last July’s events, when a bomb in the government quarter and a gunman on a nearby island left 77 dead.
Lie said, “I think the civic pride of people from Oslo is a little more subtle than that of people from other cities.” Steiro went on: “But after this very dramatic incident in the summer, the patriotism of Oslo was really forceful.” A rose parade was organized on Facebook, and more than 100,000 people turned out, without security, holding flowers. “It was very important to show that we were going to respond to this with more love, more openness and more democracy,” Lie said.
The expansion that was already under way then has become an earnest act of retaliation. The Oslo Opera House, which opened in 2008 and was designed by Snohetta, the firm in charge of the 9/11 Memorial Museum pavilion in Manhattan, is expected to have something of a “Bilbao effect.” All around it are construction sites that will become condominiums, office buildings, university buildings, a museum and a library — all part of a plan to turn the city toward the water and to try, as Steiro explained, “to give cultural status to a place that used to be more industrial.” Not that Oslo doesn’t have other charms: a 20-minute metro ride will take you cross-country skiing, and a quick ferry trip across the fjord will get you to the beach. “There’s a lot to do here,” Lie said, “which makes it a very good city to live in, and raise children.”
As for children, there are plans — part of what Steiro endearingly termed their “multi-happening life.” The couple are engaged in so many different things that they are sometimes frustrated or uncertain. But overall, they like it that way, and it seems in keeping with the changing nature of Oslo itself. “Maybe our lives are going to be like this forever,” Steiro said. “We’ll never ‘end up’ as anything, we’ll just continue doing stuff in between.” Maybe, like a city, they’ll always be in the act of becoming.
.. reminds me of Ola Rindal's photographs.
the editorial is beyond amazing
