Louder than bombs, dir. Joachim Trier, US/ Norway 2015 - Cannes 2015 Competition 

By Martin I. Petrov

How easy it is to forget the past if you’re reminded of it on every single step you make to design the future? Joachim Trier’s third film Louder than bombs, loud in emotions and precise in its storytelling, explores the consequences of forgiveness, betrayal, love and death. 

Teaming up again with Eskil Vogt (Oslo, August 31, Blind) on the script, Trier sets his first english language film in New York City and brings together Jesse Eisenberg, Isabelle Huppert and young talent Devin Druid in a slightly simplistic version of what he’s presented so far in Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31 (2011). 

Stepping on the motif of suicide and family issues, seen in the previous two films, Louder than bombs introduces us to single father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) who takes care of his 12 year old son Conrad (Druid) after his wife, a successful photographer, committed suicide by causing a car accident two years back. Conrad’s sibling, played by Jesse Eisenberg is newly married and accidentally meets his high school love at the hospital, moments after the birth of his first child. 

The character in focus is young Conrad, for whom his mother’s loss remains an open wound. Trying to protect him, Gene never revealed the truth about his wife’s death, but now an article about to be published is going to blow the secret up, deepening the family crisis. Seemingly a more light-hearted drama compared to the heavier, and even darker atmosphere in Reprise and Oslo, August 31, the American touch takes it a bit further down the road from an art house manifesto on Scandinavian lifestyle, that someone would expect. But at the same time the characters are widely developed, followed on each step and taken back in time with narrative flashbacks that set the level of involvement a tad higher. 

What Trier successfully attempts is to present the two sides of a coin, masterfully interrupting the narration with still image and raw footage from his character’s work as a photographer. Sporadically distributed throughout the film, these smart pieces of art build an antithesis between the western society - represented by Isabelle’s work - where sociopolitical stability bring to surface existential issues and personal turbulence of a new kind, as opposed to the uncertainties that burden the eastern world, diminishing all sorts of individual unsettledness. 

As the story progresses, the only character that becomes inviting to engage with is Conrad, whose addiction to video games shape an imaginary world that helps him escape his own memories and the pain. The only connection to the latter is his memoirs, non-consecutive thoughts compiled together that happens to be the most inspired piece in the film’s dialogic, presented as an esoteric monologue and an insight on unshared emotions.  

Trier’s cinematography is exceptional, splitting the second in million pieces and giving a thick flow that allows the film to breathe without adopting a disengaging sense. Powerful interpretation of western lifestyle inadequacies, Louder than bombs, although with a weaker cultural nuance, remains a solid example of social realism, open to a wider public than Trier’s previous work.