Anders Anders Danielsen Lie is a recovering drug addict who has been clean for 10 months and seems to have been in an idyllic Scandi rehab facility for all of that time. He goes on a day trip to Oslo for a job interview and sees a lot of old faces from his past. It would be wrong to say that the people are his undoing, or the city is his undoing, because Anders is already undone.
He is just looking for someone to recognise this about him, but even with his oldest friend, they just scratch the surface, focusing on the status losses that take place if you opt out of the rat race via heroin abuse. He is very sad and very lost and this spills out around the edges of conversations, in tone of voice, eyes, frustrated, pent-up energy. Anders is a coiled spring with no place to belong apart from slumped on a bed with a belt around his arm and heroin in his veins.
Many people have a nascent personal urgency running through them — maybe not as overwhelmingly as for Anders — but most people yearn to release something more primal than will ever be accepted within the run-of-the-mill business of being a decent person in society.
Most of us have the option of playing along, which is a default that can be sustained if you have a stake in the status quo, but Anders is apart from all that. He has defiant dignity which powers 90 minutes of energy combustion, like the final spectacle of a dying star. The film begins with his attempted suicide and ends with a less direct form of attempted suicide. Personal torment as relative insignificance is captured by the title, Oslo, August 31st, a sparse entry in the history of time.
In between the narrative bookends focused on achieving oblivion, Anders tries to talk to people. They are nice people who just happen to be preoccupied with understandable concerns — kids and relationships, or fun and sex. His anguish is quiet and implosive, intonation pitched as wistfully as the wind rustling through trees. He is not the type to go down amid cries for help. He is half-checked out already with no heart for conversational theatrics.
