Other than a certain maturity in the subject matter and in the ages of his principal actors, you might not detect much that is significantly different about Joachim Trier’s approach to his first English language film. Which is a good thing. LOUDER THAN BOMBS is as brilliantly written, well-characterised and stylishly directed as any of the young director’s previous two Norwegian films, REPRISE and OSLO, 31st August. And yet, whether it is the more mature characters, the use of English language or indeed just the casting of more experienced and better-known actors, Trier seems to have really arrived with this impressive new feature.

If the rigorous formal approach is a familiar one, structural shifts presented with a degree of flair, it’s undoubtedly because Trier has happily (and perhaps essentially) retained his regular screenwriter Eskil Vogt. Vogt has also turned to directing his own scripts recently in BLIND, and it would seem that growing experience and a strong working relationship between the two filmmakers has reached fruition here. The little narrative twist that they use to expand upon in LOUDER THAN BOMBS is a clever one, but it’s also a meaningful one that informs and gives power to the whole film. It features Isabelle Huppert as a dead photo journalist.

That’s not as strange as it sounds, but it’s a little more than the typical narrative device of just registering her presence in flashback. Isabelle might be dead, but she exerts a powerful influence over the family she has left behind, now as well as in the past. With a retrospective of her work being organised for a gallery, three years after her death in a car accident, her husband and her sons have to face up to the reality of the fact that in all probability Isabelle took her own life.

It’s hard to imagine any other actor carrying a central role quite so impressively as Isabelle Huppert does here…

For her husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) it’s not a prospect he relishes. Not least because he’s been trying to get his life back together, starting into a new secret relationship with teaching colleague Hannah (Amy Ryan). It’s a secret relationship because Hannah also teaches his son Conrad (Devin Druid), and relations between father and his sullen, awkward and withdrawn son haven’t been good lately. Gene hasn’t told Conrad about the true nature of his mother’s death either, and with that revelation about to be made public, it’s not going to be easy to find a good time to break the news.

The other son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), seems to be better equipped to deal with the difficult family situation. He’s a professor at university, he’s married and has just seen the birth of his first child. Jonah agrees to take on one of the many tasks that his father hasn’t been able to confront since Isabelle’s death, and that’s sorting out and organising the legacy of her photo collection. Jonah, however, despite outward appearances and his efforts to guide his younger brother’s awkward efforts to woo a girl in his class, is far from secure in his place and his role in his family – or in his marriage.

Basically, all of the men in the film have woman trouble, and in many respects – whether it’s guilt and denial over the question of her problems or simply dealing with the loss of her presence – it all stems back to their mother. That sounds like a tricky subject to handle at all effectively, but there’s no raging melodrama or wading through big archetypal psychological issues here in LOUDER THAN BOMBS. Few of the underlying complications are spelled out to the viewer, and other than the filmmaker’s clever use of imagery and structuring, there’s little obvious joining of the dots. It’s more the actual ‘presence’ of Isabelle in the film that carries the emotional heft of the implications.

It’s hard to imagine any other actor carrying a central role quite so impressively as Isabelle Huppert does here. It’s the one vital element that holds all the other meticulously crafted pieces of the film together structurally as well as emotionally. Trier has the maturity to recognise the resources he has at his disposal in Vogt’s script, and in what all the actors can do with it, and he shapes it all around the central core of Huppert’s performance. The results are impressive.

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