The Bothersome Man (2006)

 

Director: Jens Lien

Screenplay: Per Schreiner

Cast: Trond Fausa as Andreas; Petronella Barker as Anne-Britt; Per Schaanning as Hugo; Birgitte Larsen as Ingeborg; Johannes Joner as Håvard; Ellen Horn as Trulsen; Anders T. Andersen as Harald; Sigve Bøe as Liten mann; Hanne Lindbæk as Vigdis

An Abstract List Candidate

 

One manufacturer's cool coral is another manufacturer's azure.

Beginning with a shot awkwardly watching a couple necking for way too long, we realise that this is transpiring on a subway platform and that the person watching them is Andreas Ramsfjell (Trond Fausa Aurvåg), who decides to jump in front of a train immediately afterwards. Structurally however, this is not the beginning, just a snippet of the strange situation Andreas is within in this deadpan satire.

After a presumed death, the afterlife he is in means being taken by a bus to an isolated outpost with a single welcome banner (a very basic one) pinned up waiting for him. Seemingly, in this Norwegian production based on a planned radio play, he has found heaven, an urban environment where he is immediately given a job in a comfortable office as an accountant, his own place and a life with the immediate sense of everything being handed to him on a silver platter, even a romance with a seller of kitchens obsessed with interior decorating.  

Things immediately raise alerts. A man in a pub bathroom laments how hot chocolate no longer tastes great or that whilst this comes up in the conversation Andreas himself is aware that he has drunk a lot but cannot get drunk. This can still be dismissed, but when a man commits suicide by falling onto spiked railings out a window below, with everyone merely walking past on the street and two mysterious men in a van carrying him off with his guts falling out, it becomes disconcerting.

So The Bothersome Man is arguably set in a very strange form of purgatory, where one is meant to be content with the ordinary life you should have only to be bored.  A place where there are no children and it is soulless in a way the best of Scandinavian cinema, especially thinking of Swedish director Roy Andersson especially, have been able to use still and grey locations to depict. This is blatantly a critique of modernity and middle class culture as being soulless. Someone certainly had an axe to grind with interior decorators as this becomes the main example for this criticism - it is the main obsession everyone has, in these minimalist grey environments, reading magazines, discussing sofa choices at lunch and constantly redecorating. Clearly, with their tennis and dinners, The Bothersome Man's target is middle class society, with the unintentional aspect of everyone (even the extras) all being white really emphasising this oppressive Euro-Western stereotype of bland neoliberalism.

It is obvious? Frankly yes, and The Bothersome Man's one potential flaw is stretching a surface level version of the premise without adding more to it, but it negates this by delighting in a satire where someone does not bat an eye to their other half cheating on them as long as they still attend a dinner at home on Saturday. That and how "go-karts" get referenced and manages to intrigue a person who has been run over by subway train over and over again, and now looks like diced mince, in a world where death is a non-entity preventing you from leaving and the tone's deadpan nature is perfectly depicted. That it can have some very dark humour, like the ill-advised attempt at suicide that leads one to being rammed along by multiple subway trains, is helped greatly by the calm state the film stays within. It even negates that the film does play the cliché of the existential ennui of a conventional heterosexual male - it does skate on ice when, deciding to have an affair with a female co-worker, he is perturbed during a fancy dinner date that she has been dating multiple people in the office, but it is aptly the moment where she is more concerned about being able to move out of a small apartment into a house with three bedrooms and a bathroom, again space and decoration, which is the straw which breaks the camel's back. When people do not like Andreas talking about his dreams, or when his boss leaves the room awkwardly when he starts lamenting the lack of children around in melancholy, is much more universal than a bland critique of modern masculinity.

The intrigue and emotional interest helps the film greatly, overcoming a potentially one note satire, as it runs with the aesthetic of calm blandness on purpose; when Andreas re-encounters the man he never saw complaining in the toilet, who found even sex and cheeseburgers no longer appealing too, he discovers he is is effectively living in a bunker in the basement where a hole in the wall he is keeping secret is a passage to another world. Said hole, where smells and sounds come from, is clearly to a place, maybe our own again, a paradise which is true happiness. It is, when see, symbolised by a countryside house with freshly baked cake and children heard, which in itself is a cliché but a cliché stemming from literature dealing with the stagnation of modernity, say, least over a century by now plus with the countryside always idealised.

And that adds to The Bothersome Man; more so as a film from the Norwegian film industry, from a country is not as talked of as much as Danish and Swedish cinema, to the long history of culture about the ennui of modern (European) society, throwing in former EU country Britain and the non-European United States in the canon. The difference here, and the joke which does stand out greatly, is that everyone is nice and pleasant, but when someone is not satisfied is when they get concerned, not with the usual dystopian attitude of disposing of them, but offering them something else to do and only then getting them to leave. They do not have a sinister evil side, or rebels who are against the world, just very concerned figures of public perturbed by someone not feeling satisfied. [Major Spoiler] The closest thing to a violent response from them is to ship the protagonist off in the luggage compartment on the bus he came in on, to a frozen environment briefly glimpsed at the end where classical music is heard during his bumpy travel which intrigues him. [Spoilers End]

The Bothersome Man is lightly surreal; close to eccentric in truth. I would not even say The Bothersome Man is about the soullessness of consumer society, of people finding symbols to represent oneself by buying a lifestyle, but that this is pleasantness and happiness boiled down to a template lacking of individualism or primary colours. You could rewrite this film to be about "hygge", the Danish lifestyle trend that became popular here in Britain at point and sold books as an attitude of pleasantness, curdled and turned into a communist state of being nice, and this idea the film had would still work, even when hygge was entirely about the rejection of the hectic modern urban society and fetishing a slow paced idealised life in the countryside. Considering here in the afterlife you get a job, with no sense of currency issues, and a nice home the moment you step off the bus, it even has a critique in itself of the utopian society where there is something for everyone, as there are no homeless people or mess on the streets baring one suicide occasionally, but a lack of personal achievement or true happiness of an individual form. That in itself is the way that The Bothersome Man intrigues and stands out.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None