Desire tends to figure as a destructive force in the work of Joachim Trier. Anders (Anders Danielson Lie), the protagonist of Oslo, August 31 (2011), is a recovering drug addict who, by the end of the film, slips back into his old ways after a day of morale-crushing confrontations with his past. In Louder Than Bombs (2015), war photographer Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) exposes herself time and again to the brutality of conflict zones, a compulsion glibly understood as a perverse rejection of domesticity. The eponymous heroine of Thelma (2017) desires so greatly that her wants literally manifest through a kind of irrepressible telekinetic sorcery, the cause of her childhood trauma when she inadvertently transports her baby brother to his death beneath a frozen lake. Guilt abounds in these films to…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 89 - Winter 2022