For his first English language feature, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s (Reprise; Oslo, August 31st) arresting Louder than Bombs screened in Competition at Cannes this year.
Employing an outstanding international ensemble cast (including Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne and Isabelle Huppert) Trier tells the story of a family reeling from an unexpected death. Huppert plays Isabelle, a renowned war photographer whose untimely demise prompts a posthumous retrospective of her work, written up by a close former colleague (David Strathairn); which unfortunately re-opens old wounds and elicits unsettling secrets for her family, including her widowed husband (Byrne) and her sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid).
The family struggle to come to terms not just with the circumstances of Isabelle’s death, but with how she lived her life, with Trier exploring ideas of storytelling as a political act, how artistic ambition may affect or take precedence over familial relationships, and how trauma suffered by one family member may be psychologically transferred to another.
