The Bothersome Man
The Bothersome Man is for everyone who resents the bylaws in American shopping malls, or London’s Canary Wharf – private properties where careful attention has been paid to the landscaping, and free-speech rights don’t apply.
Andreas’ (Trond Fausa Aurvaag, a little like Hugh Laurie in his Wooster days) office is comfortable. His window looks out over the Scandinavian city’s gleaming landscape. He lives with a woman, Anne-Britt (Petronella Barker), who obsesses over the layout of their bathroom. His colleagues flick through sofa catalogs, discussing which is contemporary and which is casual. But none of them is better than the other. Everyone says “sure, if you want” or “that would be nice.” No one expresses his or her feelings. It’s doubtful their feelings even exist.
Andreas hops off the bus in front of a gas station in a lava desert, hitches a ride with a man who offers him his name, house keys and details of his job before dropping Andreas off in front of his apartment in the city. He goes to work the next morning and it’s as if he has always been there. Did all his colleagues get their jobs this way? If it were you, would you ask? Everyone wears smart grey or black suits. It’s all very pleasant. No one complains. Nothing’s wrong. Except a man in a bar complains – rightly – that food has no flavor anymore. And men in grey boiler suits (Who are they? Who do they work for?) clean up the body of a man impaled on fence railings.
Is it seeing the body that makes Andreas wonder? Or is it when he accidentally slices off his finger, only to unwind the bandages back home and find it painlessly reattached?
Unusually, The Bothersome Man is adapted from an award-winning radio play by Per Schreiner. After the showing at the London Film Festival, director Jens Lien explained how hard he and Schreiner worked to translate the radio narration of Andreas’ disaffection into visual terms. They have done so brilliantly: The tasteful, lifeless and perfect production design by Are Sjaastad mutates well-designed flatpack living into a dystopian horror show. You’ll never look at an Ikea catalog the same way again. And by refusing to explain the surreal elements of his film, Lien packs it with a tremendous punch. This city, its niceness and the lack of flavor isn’t all there is. And the film forces us to ask ourselves if it is all we want.
© 2006 Sarah Manvel. All rights reserved.
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