by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
This usually never happens, because as a critic these movies are free screeners, but I paid the $6.99 rental fee on YouTube to see Stellan Skarsgård’s new film OUT STEALING HORSES. Why? As a vote of confidence in advance for Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland and his leading man. Ever since our conference call for their other film IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE, it has been clear that the projects these two embark on are indelible in some way.
Once again about the intricate un-mined dynamics within families, OUT STEALING HORSES takes the blank note the departing wife leaves for her husband from IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE and extrapolates the bare wooden unfinished planks of that emotion into yet another set of disordered, yet orderly characters. When the estranged wife in this film receives a devastating note that her husband will never return, though he left some money from their timber haul? The wife simply repeats the word, “Lumber.” In this mere word, she lets the audience know how little she really knows about this man, her husband. To get these aching layers of depth, as seems logical, a lot depends on the source material.
In this case 2003’s Norwegian best-seller “Ut og stjæle hester” by Per Petterson. Oddly “Ut og stjæle hester” was translated two years later into British English for the UK by Ann Born in 2005, then later in 2007 for the US and wider Anglophone market. In Ireland that same year, 2007, this book swept to glory, winning one of the significantly monied literary prizes.
But putting the book’s accolades aside, this new film adaptation is just as teeth-grinding. Moland and Skarsgard get this story in their bones, and have the chops to take a delicate human-scale masterpiece and avoid it turning into a farrago of mixed-up plots.
Trond Sander (Skarsgard) moves between 1999, waiting for a new millennium to dawn, whilst harking back to 1948. The Swedish Resistance, under cover in Norway at times, has a place in this tale. And yes, there will be Nazi’s; however, the focal point of this narrative is how we recognize, but we don’t see what we are looking at. In other words, Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes may appear similar, but ideologically? This is where the phenotypes divide.
With his own emotional Y2K looming current older Trond is at an impasse. He can not, forgive this one, see the forest for the family trees. And it is in the thicket of details in Trond’s emotional memory that the audience begins to glean which trees have been savagely cut down, and which timber is the foundation of his own identity now as a 67-year-old widower.
OUT STEALING HORSES could be called a “coming of rage” story, as it peels this woodland tale back to the bare trunk of 15-year-old teen Trond without the thick bark of his battered older self.
Jon Ranes as young Trond is note-for-note perfect here; as is Danica Curcic, who plays the mother of his best friend, whose family tragedy only mounts when Trond’s father lets his personal life run wild.
Tobias Santelmann makes you think of an Ingmar Bergman film, with all the arched brows, and echo of few words. Thus Moland wields his directorial power like a chainsaw here. Skarsgard’s embedded time-crossed character is at once hewn into usefulness as a plot device, but carved into a performance that needs a better word than transcendent.
But Moland isn’t just great at directing men on screen. One of the most moving moments is between older Trond and his chiding daughter, who had to hunt to find her father in Norway. After they break the ice in his modest cabin, she cites the work her father had read to her in the past, a “scary” book somehow, being “David Copperfield.” The opening lines of Charles Dickens read: “CHAPTER 1. I am born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show…”
Immediately Trond understands a lifetime of ignorance in his working knowledge of his own daughter, whose mother he was in a “twinned” existence with for 38 years. His offspring as stranger to friend and back to “my little one” is the cycle here, which takes place in under three minutes. That’s the remarkable subtext that shines through even in two different languages to the screen.
Take a look now at OUT STEALING HORSES
Magnolia Pictures has this release date as Aug. 7, which is perfect for the hot weather, as it is largely shot in the ice and snow of remote unavailability between father and son, mother and child, neighbor and neighbor, country and country, even as the strains of past wars tear at the social contract. In other words, OUT STEALING HORSES is a real movie, in the classic sense, where hearts are broken and new bonds are forged between these characters that stand in for us and our families on film.
Official Magnolia Pictures on this new Moland-helmed movie
November 1999: 67-year-old Trond (Stellan Skarsgård), lives in self-imposed isolation and looks forward to welcoming in the new millennium alone. As winter arrives he meets one of his few neighbors, Lars (Bjørn Floberg), and realizes he knew him back in the summer of 1948. 1948 – the year Trond turned 15. The summer Trond grew up. OUT STEALING HORSES is based on the bestselling novel by Norwegian author Per Petterson, which received several important international awards and was included in The New York Times ’10 Best Books of 2007 (Fiction)’. Petterson’s novels have been translated into more than 50 languages.
Written and Directed by: Hans Petter Moland
Produced by: Turid Øversveen, Håkon Øverås
Stars: Stellan Skarsgård, Bjørn Floberg, Tobias Santelmann, Jon Ranes, Danica Curcic
This film is in Norwegian and Swedish, but you won’t notice once the bough breaks on the drama. Maybe OUT STEALING HORSES is really about how our souls can be unbreakable as wild horses; yet we all wear a saddle of some kind in this life. So $6.99 is a small price to pay for that insight.
#OutStealingHorses
Værsågod.
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