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 Director: Bent Hamer
Cast: Baard Owe, Espen Skjønberg
Year: 2007
Runtime: 90 minutes
Country: Norway
Language: Norwegian with English subtitles
Rating: Not rated
The moment the train leaves the station without engineer ODD HORTEN (Bard Owe) aboard, he realizes that the path ahead is a journey without printed timetables and well-known stations. Horten has been forced to retire after 40 years of traveling a very stable rail, and the platform does not feel like a safe place anymore. His orderly, solitary existence is about to give way to a future of unlikely adventures and puzzling dilemmas: will Horten ever travel by plane? Will he finally sell his prized boat? How does Horten end up in a pair of women's red high-heeled shoes? Will he survive a nighttime drive with a blindfolded man at the wheel? Proof positive that there is humor to be found in aging, and we don't have to be elderly Norwegians to identify, laugh and embrace life in all its idiosyncratic splendor.
"O'Horten" is Bent Hamer's wonderfully skewed view of the human condition and gives us that somewhat absurdist vision with great warmth, a little melancholy and universal appeal.
"Much of O'Horten feels universal -- regrets, embarrassments, coincidences, unexpected pleasures -- but it also feels very Norwegian; it's wintertime, and we get a sense of Oslo's public spaces and private places. O'Horten doesn't have much of a plot, but then again, if you asked most people for the three-act structure of the day they're having (or the life they're living) I doubt they'd give you much of an answer. O'Horten is a smaller film, a slice of life, but it's so well-done -- so generous and smart and funny and sympathetic -- that it completely wins you over." - James Rocchi, Cinematical
Reviews: www.rottentomatoes.com/m/o_horten
Official site www.sonyclassics.com/ohorten
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