The Bothersome Man

The Bothersome Man

The Bothersome Man

The Bothersome Man

Moviecut—The Bothersome Man

At first sight The Bothersome Man seems like several other movies/books rolled into one. Kafka's The Trial, Melville's Bartleby, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Groundhog Day instantly spring to mind. A man, Andreas, arrives in a nameless city where he is immediately given a job in an office and finds a beautiful new girlfriend. However, there's a catch: his colleagues are all friendly, bland and utterly characterless, and everyone he knows, including his girlfriend, seems to have only one topic of conversation -interior design. Welcome to the hell of modern consumerism, in which people throw themselves from buildings and no one raises an eyebrow, or spend their days reading furniture catalogues and eating food that tastes of nothing. Andreas quickly realises his predicament and spends the rest of the film trying to escape, in various ways. Suicide turns out not to be an option, and when he finds a new girlfriend she is just as bereft of feelings as the old one - there is a wonderful scene in a restaurant where he asks her to move in with him and all she can say is, 'I don't mind'. In fact, much of what The Bothersome Man has to say has been said before, and after about 45 minutes you begin to feel that you indeed are experiencing a certain sense of deja vu. Yet its point is one that is probably worth repeating, over and over again: an unexamined life is one that is not worth living. Added to which, it provides a decidedly modern take on the perennial theme of how capitalism is destroying our souls. More than one character reminded me of people I've known, especially his furniture-obsessed girlfriend, and if by the end of the film the film-makers have run out of ideas, maybe that's the point - there will no end unless you can find other people who share your sense of alienation.

Trond Fausa Aurvaag stars as Andreas, a solitary 40 year old man who opens this film by leaping to his death under an oncoming subway train (we hear a gruesome crunch, not the last of these we'll confront). We next find him, bearded and disheveled, arriving as the lone passenger on a bus that delivers him to a forlorn old gas station in the middle of a barren high plain reminiscent of U.S. Great Basin country, though presumably it's shot in Norway or Iceland. So, this is a flashback, right? Well, not so fast, there. Seems more like a flash forward the more we learn. Everyone's expecting him: the old man who takes him from the desert to a posh contemporary apartment house in a city full of pale gray blue modern buildings, at its center, surrounded by older urban neighborhoods. In the closet of his apartment is a complete wardrobe of clothes that fit him. He asks what job he has been assigned and is told he will be an accountant in a large downtown firm. He cleans up, shaves and arrives for work next morning, where he is warmly greeted by everyone, and starts to work as if he has all the requisite skills for the job. He meets various people over the next weeks, takes a lover, relaxes. But there are unsettling aspects to his new life, for that is what it appears to be. Alcohol no longer makes him or anyone else high. Food looks great but has little flavor. Even sex, while easily available, seems bland . The women he takes up with seem more interested in the quarters they live in, and his ability to provide for them materially, than they are in him. Horrid events occur: he sees a suicidal man, now dead, impaled on a sharp edged wrought iron fence. At the office, on impulse, he slices off his finger in an automated paper cutter. People seem to take such occurrences in stride, showing little or no affect. There are uniformed attendants in gray blue jumpsuits, driving gray blue minivans, who calmly, mutely service people like these. When they take Andreas home and he unwraps the dressing from the stump of his finger he finds it (magically) whole again, without a trace of trauma. Hmmmmm. Things go on like this. Andreas attempts suicide again in the local subway but, while battered terribly (over the course of a night, he's hit and dragged by three different trains), he is able to walk away. Bloodied and looking like a cadaver when he returns to his lover's house, she merely smiles and mentions they have been invited to friends' for dinner later in the week. Hmmmmm. Later he discovers an underground shaft that appears to lead to another world. He and an associate blast a tunnel but, just short of his goal of escape from this bizarre dystopia, the men in gray blue arrive, drag the two away, seal up the tunnel, but immediately release the men without incarceration, trial or any other punishment than enforcement of their unwanted stay in this odd paradise. But Andreas continues to be bothersome. He acts unhappy, which turns out to be the worst offense here, one that in time leads him to be expelled from the community. He's taken back to the desert, forced into the cargo bay of the bus, and driven away. At some point the bus stops, Andreas kicks the door open, and disappears into a white, featureless expanse marked by howling winds, like the middle of a blizzard. The bus pulls away, the screen fades to final darkness. There you have it. I strongly disliked the film, and more than once had to resist the urge to leave, though it does hang together, and its protagonist is a mildly interesting character. This film will certainly be a candidate for my annual Metaphysical Melange Award. What we seem to have here is purgatory, or hell, or heaven, a nether world where you go after death but where, unlike in Sartre's formulation, there is indeed an exit. My grades: 5/10 (C) (Seen on 02/02/07)

I admire the people that wrote those admirable comments about this so called Masterpiece. I'm quite flummoxed. How can they see this movie as an Oustanding Work of Art? and full of superior hidden messages only decipherable by the few exquisite ones. Louis B. Mayer once said, talking about his movies: "If I wanted to send a message, I will go to Western Union". I detected an outstanding piece of artwork within this film, that impaled man on the piercing ends of the iron work on that front fence of a private city house, in an early scene. If we could take that wax doll and spread it out on the cement floor of a museum, with the bloody mess of its inner guts all around it, with some yards of fence around it and put it on a well lighted platform in some contemporary art museum, it certainly would become, instantly, the main attraction in that show of contemporary art. I also enjoyed opened mouthed ( And, oh! envied soooo much!), the cleanliness of the sidewalks and streets on that city..., because when I compare them with the awful mess we are living right now in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I couldn't believe my eyes. Man! this Norwegians are CLEAN! I bet you that if a Norwegian comes over to visit this city, he will think that he landed in Real Hell. Broken sidewalks, erased traffic marks, mountains of garbage all over the city, totally void of containers, so the 'cartoneros' --carton scavengers-- mendicants and stray dogs, spread open the plastic garbage bags looking for spoils to eat or sell and the whole city looks like a battlefield, where everyone lost the war. A perfect nightmare setting for the filming of a Horror movie. You only have to bring over the Zombies. And I envy the people that LOVED this movie, because, Franky my Dears, I don't give a damn about it!

I consider myself a fairly good critic of dead pan humour and have watched quite a few European films in this genre. This film is somewhere on the planet Mercury in comparison with the dead pan humour and work of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Even "Kitchen Stories" by Bent Hamer had much more going for it than this film. And that was as nearly exciting as peeling an apricot. Put me in the editing suite and I'd hack it down to a 20 minute short. Sparse dialogue and incredibly long cuts do not make for a good film nor does the opening homage shot to Paris Texas - a cheap shot at a brilliant film that did illustrate alienation and angst. Had the director wanted to tell us what we already know, that Norway is boring, then all he need do would be to film a roll of wallpaper being rolled and unrolled. It would have been a lot more exciting, especially had it carried a flower print. Finally my cat knows nothing of existentialism but he knows a good film when he sees one. He was sick all over my bed within the first fifteen minutes. Tip: The Director and crew should consider getting a job in a smelting foundry given that they like steel so much. I award it the points of the Norwegian winter temperature - 30 C and 1 point for the runner.

Give me just one single break!! Pretentious art house nonsense! I found myself open mouthed at the sheer ineptitude of this movie. Dialogue that took the "story" nowhere and acting that would have made Keanu Reeves look like Anthony Hopkins. A film specially made for pseudo intellectuals who see meaning in everything whether it exists or not-and believe me-there is no meaning in this movie at all. Shame on the perpetrators of this cr*p!! Pasolini has done it before and better (even if that too was just jer*ing off). Never mind straight to DVD-straight to the rubbish bin. I give this one for the make up man/woman.

First of all, forget all the Christian stuff (heaven, hell, purgatory). You are in Norway. The director intended well to show it is shot in Oslo, it is easy to recognize the places. It is a sharp look at the values that rules the country and at the lack of sentiments and feeling of the Norwegian society. Note that Andreas - does he arrive to Oslo by his own will - does not really has a job, but a place in the society that give him access to "happyness": - an apartment - a convertible - friends from the work place - a girl, who has only interest for kitchens - another girl who cannot say I want but only I may The girls are cruelly described, but again the 1st one is the typical Norwegian "witch" (sorry to use this word, I translate literally from Norwegian) and the second the everyone's girl friend; both are typical characters of the Norwegian society. Andreas has other values, is sensitive and want to make choices: warm chocolate and children. It is deep buried in the cellars of the old buildings of Oslo housing old people; the room at the end of the tunnel is a typical grandma Norwegian kitchen. The soundtrack is Peer Gynt, almost the Norwegian national anthem, adding again to that lost paradise's nostalgia. The final scene is shot at the house of common of Oslo and the people coming out of the building are meant to be the deputies or minister of the country and they tell Andreas that they did everything to make him happy, if I remember correctly, just before expelling him. Although Andreas injures himself to show his feelings,the gore scenes may seem strange here but maybe the director use it to mock the conformity of the Norwegian cinema, as it has been mandatory for the last decade to show very violent scenes in almost every movie. Is the bus also a typical character of the Norwegian society? I wonder because for celebrating the end of the studies , the Norwegian students have "party buses" this ritual marks the entering into the adult life, and Andreas coming from nowhere in a bus to this town. what do you think?