Odd is his name and odd is his movie.
"O’Horten," a Norwegian film that opened here yesterday, is a very different film, which is the kindest way to describe a movie written and directed by Bent Hamer. Odd Horten, played with wonderfully dead-pan skill by Baard Owe, is an engineer on the Oslo-Bergen railroad line, a beautiful trip through the mountains across the country.
He’s a man of extreme silence, with a woman friend in Bergen, perhaps one in Oslo, as Sir Alec Guinness had in "The Captain’s Paradise." He’s also a man of rigid habits; he says little and he lives his life in a dedicated routine.
Either way, he has reached the end of the line. It’s time to retire, to take his gold watch.
But he and some railroad companions go out for a drink, and, in his own way, Horten gets into trouble. Looking for a friend who works at an airport, a place Horten has never visited, he goes wandering around the tarmac, can’t understand the furor when he lights his pipe. Later, deeply into his cups and trying to connect with a woman, he climbs into the wrong window and lands in a small boy’s bedroom.
Hamer is a writer with dry wit, and a director who goes, very simply, from point A to point B. But "O’Horten" is just too dry and too simple to offer much entertainment.
At the Plaza Frontenac
-Joe