Odd Horten (Baard Owe) is a train driver in Norway who is nearing his retirement. He lives alone with no company but his pet budgie, and doesn't socialise much with his fellow staff though they have a celebration planned to commemorate his nearly forty years of excellent service the next day, but he really doesn't want a fuss, all he wants is to complete his job to his own satisfaction and look forward to doing something else with his life in his autumn years. The pub, eating meals served by hs lady friend, smoking his pipe, nothing too spectacular...
But what if life had other plans for him? This was director Bent Hamer's first film back in Europe after the middling success of his Charles Bukowski adaptation Factotum, and saw him on surer ground, probably thanks to being back on his home turf of Norway. Nevertheless, there was a very slight feel to O'Horten, a work which invited the audience to allow the passage of incidents simply wash over them, or alternatively to do all the hard work of fathoming what it was Hamer wished to impart. That message appeared to be your basic seize the day platitudes, so it was really the journey which provided the entertainment.
The big hint that arrives shortly after our hero has had his leaving ceremony with his admiring coleagues which indicates his retirement may not be as settled as he would expect is when he goes to visit a friend that night, but finds the intercom on the building broken, so inventively climbs the scaffolding on the outside and gets in that way. However, far from spending the evening with his mate, he spends it with a little boy who refuses to let him sneak away from his room: Horten is trying to make as little fuss as possible, but accidentally falls asleep and has to creep out of the apartment in the morning. This is an example of the film's deadpan but absurd sense of humour.
Something which is wryly amusing, but unlikely to have you rolling around on the floor in hilarity. Much of the rest of the film takes that path: Horten sets out perform a task which will help him settle into boring old age, but then events conspire against him to see to it that things don't turn out quite the way he anticipated, or indeed anything like he anticipated in many cases. That snooze spent in a little boy's bedroom means he is late for his final day of work, for all we know the first time he has ever missed a day of work, and from there his existence becomes a chapter of accidents as for instance he tries to sell his boat to an airport worker but ends up getting a cavity search thanks to a sniffer dog picking up on his pipe tobacco.
Funny? Well, sort of, but with every scene approached in the same quiet, straightfaced manner it could be you would be lulled into a mild stupor by the reserved mood. Such sequences as the one where the retiree tries to relax at a sauna only to fall asleep and wake up after hours are entertaining because of the discomfort of the main character, especially as he goes for a swim in the empty pool and is interrupted by two nude lesbians who jump in with him and he has to slip away unnoticed and alarmed. But Hamer wasn't set on making life as difficult for Horten as possible, he was trying to point something out to him, that his life was one unlived because he had never taken any chances, or tried to do anything he might truly enjoy thanks to sticking to the railway tracks of his career and not thinking of branching out into something brighter or emotionally satisfying. The old man he meets in lying in the street, the one who claims to be able to drive with his eyes closed, finally wakes him up for a sweet ending. But it's still a muted film. Music by John Erik Kaada.
