PICK O’Horten: An Endearing Oddball From Norway

A A A Comments By Scott Foundas Wednesday, Jun 17 2009

Hans-Jorgan Osnes/Sony Pictures Classics

Owe runs off the rails.

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Runs at Varsity, Fri., June 19–Thurs., June 25. Rated PG-13. 90 minutes.

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The premise of this gentle existential farce from Norwegian director Bent Hamer is little more than an excuse for a series of deadpan vignettes about love, death, and the meaning of life. Forced into age-mandated retirement, longtime train engineer Odd Horten (Bård Owe) quite literally goes off the rails and spends most of the movie dazedly wandering the wintry streets of Oslo, searching a maze-like airport for a prospective buyer for his boat, chatting up the recently widowed proprietress of a tobacco shop, and—in the film's loveliest sequence—riding shotgun with an avuncular old drunkard who prides himself on the ability to drive blindfolded. Above all, Horten—like his Seussian near-namesake—seeks a sense of purpose. Hamer, whose Kitchen Stories tipped its hat to Tati and whose Factotum made an admirable stab at Charles Bukowski, here achieves a tone somewhere in the ballpark of Kaurismäki, with Owe's wonderfully stoic face rarely bending as it observes his fellow man in all his small-scale absurdities. The images, lit by the cameraman John Christian Rosenlund, have the incandescent glow of storybook illustrations. The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly.