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I've just read this review of a new film called The Bothersome Man. The review isn't entirely complimentary, but I like the sound of the film.
In The Bothersome Man, director Jens Lien takes a stereotyped Scandinavia – clean, nice, a little dull – and exaggerates it into a numbing dystopia of offices, dinner parties, consumerism and interior design, a sterile suspension between life and death.
Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag), an accountant, is dropped off a bus at a rusting petrol station in the middle of a grey-brown desert, and taken into a city where everything seems perfect –he is given an apartment and a job, and effortlessly acquires friends and a girlfriend – except for the fact that the world has been drained of colour, sensation and emotion. Andreas has no idea how he came to be here, and no idea how to escape: drunkenness is impossible, as is losing the self in music or sex; the streets are patrolled by agents alert to any signs of independence of spirit; and he can’t even kill himself.
Problematically, the more successfully the film conveys the all-consuming stupefaction of boredom, and the alienating effect of being confronted with life’s inanities, as it lingers on the flat and the trivial and maintains its slow and unchanging pace, the more soporific and uninvolving it becomes to watch. And it can’t reach towards any kind of narrative development or conclusion, or even clarification, as this would negate its absurdity. Still, this is an effective, if perhaps not very complex (and sometimes rather heavy-handed) rehearsal of Kafkaesque and Beckettian themes, and a visually elegant portrayal of a man’s struggle to feel alive.
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