With «Hawaii, Oslo» Erik Poppe continued his Oslo Trilogy (begun with «Schpaaa»), as well as making the second feature in his filmography. From a script by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg, based on an idea of the two, Poppe built a choral film that, for a second foray into the fiction feature film, is a leap not of 7 but of 14 leagues! Movies with several interconnected stories are not a novelty and, if it is about finding similarities, it would be necessary to cite Altman, Kieslowski, P. T. Anderson or Iñárritu, whose «Amores perros» I remembered in the first minutes of «Hawaii, Oslo.»
According to Poppe, during the shooting of «Schpaaa», he met people in Oslo whose stories he wanted to capture in a collective drama. The mystery of the premonitory dream is the unifying thread of the incidents, through the character of Vidar (Trond Espen Seim), a nurse at a psychological care center, who glimpses relationships, exchanges, transformations and deaths .
During the hottest day of 2004 in Oslo, Vidar dreams that Leon, a young patient waiting for a visit from a childhood friend on his birthday, is run over by an ambulance, and so begins the multiple and parallel account of the lives of two boys whose father has died and are going to be separated by social workers, their singer mother whom they have not seen for 11 years and who has just been rescued from a suicide attempt, a couple who must raise $105,000 in 12 hours to pay in the United States for the operation of their son who was just born with a congenital malformation, Leon's brother that obtains a provisional leave from prison to celebrate his brother's birthday and who has a hidden agenda, the driver of a fatal ambulance, a newspaper-delivery and psychic little girl, plus doctors, bankers and Oslo marginal people. And lots of action: people racing, runaway cars and the ticking of the clock which never stops.
The result is an exciting drama, solidly put together by editor Einar Egeland, with plot twists and reversal of fortune that sometimes surprise us and others, confirm our feelings. However, the entire package is irreproachable compact, with very good performances and values in the technical areas. When I finished watching it, I thought that the best world cinema is made without fanfare by Poppe, Sorrentino, Weerasethakul, and many other lesser known filmmakers, showing beings with lives similar to yours and mine, not hollow characters in stuffy melodramas, with or without Netflix support." See it. You will be grateful.
According to Poppe, during the shooting of «Schpaaa», he met people in Oslo whose stories he wanted to capture in a collective drama. The mystery of the premonitory dream is the unifying thread of the incidents, through the character of Vidar (Trond Espen Seim), a nurse at a psychological care center, who glimpses relationships, exchanges, transformations and deaths .
During the hottest day of 2004 in Oslo, Vidar dreams that Leon, a young patient waiting for a visit from a childhood friend on his birthday, is run over by an ambulance, and so begins the multiple and parallel account of the lives of two boys whose father has died and are going to be separated by social workers, their singer mother whom they have not seen for 11 years and who has just been rescued from a suicide attempt, a couple who must raise $105,000 in 12 hours to pay in the United States for the operation of their son who was just born with a congenital malformation, Leon's brother that obtains a provisional leave from prison to celebrate his brother's birthday and who has a hidden agenda, the driver of a fatal ambulance, a newspaper-delivery and psychic little girl, plus doctors, bankers and Oslo marginal people. And lots of action: people racing, runaway cars and the ticking of the clock which never stops.
The result is an exciting drama, solidly put together by editor Einar Egeland, with plot twists and reversal of fortune that sometimes surprise us and others, confirm our feelings. However, the entire package is irreproachable compact, with very good performances and values in the technical areas. When I finished watching it, I thought that the best world cinema is made without fanfare by Poppe, Sorrentino, Weerasethakul, and many other lesser known filmmakers, showing beings with lives similar to yours and mine, not hollow characters in stuffy melodramas, with or without Netflix support." See it. You will be grateful.