FilmJuice have my review of Joachim Trier’s third feature film Louder than Bombs. I must admit to being rather disappointed with this film as, on paper, it is pretty much exactly the type of film I tend to enjoy. The film revolves around the family of a successful war photographer played by the wonderful Isabelle Huppert. After years of bickering with her husband, the photographer agrees to retire only to wind up dying in what appears to be a car accident. Without the photographer’s cycle of anxious departure and grateful return to hold the family together, the husband falls out with his two sons until a retrospective of the photographer’s career brings them all together to forces them to confront old problems.

What I liked about this film was Trier’s willingness to break with conventional style, narrative, and character-development to suggest that while the photographer may have been a different person at home and in the field, the same is also true of those she left behind. In effect, the film suggests that rather than having a ‘true self’, people have (a) an internal conflict between the person they are and the person they want to be, and (b) a series of external conflicts between the personas they inhabit and the way that other people see them. In essence, this is a film about the chaotic groundlessness of the self and why every attempt to understand each other or define ourselves is doomed to failure.I tend to like art that deals with the concept of the self and I particularly appreciate it when works ride out against the Victorian novelistic idea that people have well-formed characters that exist as part of dramatically-satisfying narrative arcs.

What I didn’t like about this film is that while Trier seemed willing to ride out against these Victorian ideas, he seemed weirdly reluctant to give up a lot of the storytelling aesthetics and narrative techniques that accompany the Victorian novelist’s ideas about selfhood:

The problem is that while Trier uses a number of clever cinematic techniques to articulate his ideas about identity, the bulk of the film remains grounded in a very traditional approach to both storytelling and character. Thus, while the film builds towards moments of family reconciliation and acceptance of hidden truths about the mother, it also wants to suggest that the mother is fundamentally unknowable and that true reconciliation is a psychological impossibility. The result is a film that contains some lovely moments and a few nice touches but feels both unfinished and half-hearted.

The FilmJuice review was originally going to be a bit longer as reading a bit about Joachim Trier’s career brought to mind an interesting quirk in the way film critics write about the industry.

Usually, when people write about the careers of creative people they tend to emphasise the individual agency of their subjects. While these types of stories have their place, they tend to downplay the extent to which the film industry requires a steady stream of supplicants who will inevitably be broken and remade to fit into whichever professional niches happen to need filling. In truth, it really does not matter what brought the likes of Chris Pratt and Ryan Reynolds to the acting profession as Hollywood will always need charming men who are handsome and easy to work with.

Hollywood has a long history of making ‘inside baseball’ films that dwell on the harsh realities of the acting profession but American film tends to pull its punches when it comes to considering the people say behind the camera. For every Living in Oblivion there are a dozen films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Sunset Boulevard. In fact, one of the most refreshing things about the French New Wave was that films like Le Mepris and Day for Night were happy to suggest that writers and directors are often just as disposable as actors.

Looking at Joachim Trier’s career thus far, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if he wound up directing Oscarbait at some point in the next ten years. Louder than Bombs contains some cleverness but not so much cleverness that it overwhelms the acting and the excellent cast suggests that Trier is already proving adept at attracting bankable talent. While I won’t labour the point, I think that the careers of ambitious directors like Trier should be spoken of not in terms of personal vision but in terms of their ability to do a job and fill a professional niche. Hollywood needs people who can direct actors and be a little bit clever just as it needs people who are used to working quickly and taking orders from executive producers.