Is Oslo, August 31st a true story? It's the third telling of one man's last day, and the first wasn't fiction
Joachim Trier’s masterpiece is an adaptation of an adaptation — and if you follow the chain back far enough, you arrive at a real man in 1920s Paris.
Strictly speaking, no — Anders, the 34-year-old recovering addict drifting through Oslo, August 31st on a day's leave from rehab, is an invention. But the story he's living through is not Trier's, and it wasn't fiction when it was first told. Trier's 2011 film is the third telling of one man's last day on earth, and the first version was simply a life.
The chain, link by link
- The man: Jacques Rigaut. A Dadaist poet in 1920s Paris, author of blackly comic texts about self-destruction, who spent a decade announcing his own exit and made good on it in 1929, at 30.
- The novel: Le Feu Follet (1931). Rigaut's friend, the writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, built his protagonist Alain Leroy directly on Rigaut) — a burnt-out charmer out of a clinic, making the rounds of old friends in Paris and finding no reason to stay. Barely a costume change separates the character from the man. Drieu, grimly, would take his own life in 1945.
- The first film: The Fire Within (1963). Louis Malle transposed the novel to contemporary Paris, swapped heroin for alcohol, cast Maurice Ronet and scored it with Satie. It remains one of French cinema's most devastating portraits of a man closing his own accounts.
- The second film: Trier's. Same structure, same single day, moved to modern Oslo and back to addiction.
What Trier changed, and why it works
Trier came to the material through Malle rather than the novel, and at a particular moment — as he told ScreenAnarchy:
"I watched this one a few years ago, when I was at a stage of my life when I reached my 30's, and was feeling a little lost after a break-up."
His approach to adapting it was almost flippant in its modesty — take the skeleton, drop it into his own city:
"We can take this story, set it in Oslo today, and maybe we don't need much more of an idea than this character kind of being this hip, cool, middle class guy."
The part was written for Anders Danielsen Lie, who shares his character's first name and — in one of cinema's better bits of trivia — is a practising medical doctor when he isn't acting. What Trier added that neither Drieu nor Malle had: the opening chorus of ordinary voices recalling their own memories of Oslo over home-movie fragments of the city. One day, one man, one date in the title — and around him, a city's worth of lives that carry on.