Trier didn't make a film inspired by Malle's Le Feu Follet. He remade it—but this time in contemporary Oslo, with heroin addiction replacing the unnamed despair of Malle's protagonist. The structure is explicit: a man on his final day, moving through the city as if saying goodbye. Malle taught Trier that cinema could hold a single character's interior collapse with unflinching tenderness, that the everyday street could become a kind of death march.
Films That Influenced Oslo August 31st
