The Norwegian and Polish Competition entries here at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival both offer portraits of artists, though they could not be more different. Norwegian Reprise is Joachim Trier’s feature debut and examines the lives of two young aspiring writer friends whose combined age is less than the age of the real-life Polish poet Miron Bialoszewski when we meet him in Parę osób, mały czas (Several People, Little Time) from Polish veteran director Andrzej Barański.

Reprise could be dubbed a Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) for the current twentysomething generation, and the film even detours to Paris several times and has sequences in black and white to underline the point. Interestingly, it similarities are not so much in the story (though it does involve two artistic friends and a girl), but in its ability to seamlessly synthesise the heedless energy of youth and its pronounced melancholy undercurrents. 

The film opens with a black and white “what-if” sequence in which the 23-year-old friends Erik (Espen Kloumann Høiner, a Norwegian August Diehl) and Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie) post their respective novel manuscripts in the hope a publisher will find them good enough to print. In a visually witty manner several outcomes are proposed before the main story unfolds, which involves initial success for Philip but not for Erik. Erik’s euphoria is short-lived however when his obsessive romance with Kari (Victoria Winge) “triggers his psychosis” and he ends up in the hospital.

Both Philip and Erik are great admirers of lauded Norwegian novelist Sten Egil Dahl, who fled abroad after his first success as a young novelist and now, in old age, lives as a recluse in Oslo, only venturing outside to walk his dog. Dahl’s fate can be seen as a foreshadowing of what a career in writing might do to the two young talents, who have a large circle of friends and lovers now but whose need to create might get in the way of a normal lifestyle. 

Exactly one year after their first romantic get-together, Philip and Kari are in Paris again, and Philip painstakingly tries to recreate what happened spontaneously the first time around hoping it will inspire his creativity in what plays like a real-life application of Wordsworth’s famous description of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity”.

Trier definitely announces himself as a major new name on the European scene with this film that warrants multiple viewings to understand and fully absorb all it has to say.

Already an established name in Poland is director Andrzej Barański, who also examines literary creation and more particularly how it becomes an obstacle in the relationship between state-sponsored communist era poet Miron Bialoszewski (Andrzej Hudziak) and his blind secretary and aspiring poetess Jadwiga Stańczak (Krystyna Janda) in Parę osób, mały czas (Several People, Little Time), which is based on a true story. 

Miron and Jadwiga are a perfectly platonic couple (he is gay) but kibbitz more -- and better -- than most married couples. She is more caring while he is more easily angered, perhaps feeling this is justified because of his vocation. The film offers us almost two hours of daily scenes from their lives, in all its wonderful simplicity as well as its ugliness.  

1970s and early 1980s Warsaw are subtly evoked through production and costume design and its saturated greenish-yellow cinematography is reminiscent of visual palette of Berlinale entry Requiem, which was set in the same period and which plays in one of the sidebars here at Karlovy Vary, where the lives of artists as told by other artists are but one of the festival's pleasures.