Imagine the numb horror if you could never get so much as the slightest
buzz on, no matter what or how much you drank. Would there even be any
point in entering a bar? Perhaps you genuinely enjoy the taste of a Cuba
Libre or a fine Chablis — but what if nothing had much flavor, either? Such
is the perpetually lovely and pleasant but fundamentally sterile world
into which Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag) stumbles at the outset of The
Bothersome Man, a surreal Norwegian satire directed by Jens Lien. Arriving
alone at a bus depot in the middle of nowhere, Andreas, who has the
gangly, bug-eyed demeanor of a mantis who's lost his prayerbook, is
shuttled to an unnamed city, where he's awarded a cushy job and quickly
lands a hot chick. Except the work is easy but dull, the sex is frequent
but passionless, and the absence of pain — when Andreas accidentally cuts
off one his fingers, it just grows right back — also entails a corresponding
absence of pleasure. He's trapped in the Talking Heads classic "Heaven":
"There is a party/Everyone is there/Everyone will leave at exactly the
same time."
Is Andreas in heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Or just Oslo? The Bothersome Man is intriguingly bizarre, but only in the most superficial,
what-the-hell's-going-on-here? sort of way; written by Per Schreiner, it's
a free-floating allegory with precious little real-world resonance. For
instance, why are there no children in this mysterious Ikea world? Because
kids are anarchic and unpredictable (in which case their absence is just a
conceptual convenience), or because yuppies are less likely to have
children (which isn't really accurate, since they just tend to have them
later in life)? And why does our appealingly hapless hero get on the bus
in the first place? Voluntary or involuntary? (Seems like the former, but
we get no hint of what he's pursuing and/or fleeing wherever he came
from.) For that matter, if this alternate reality is meant to mirror the
narcissistic emptiness of contemporary society (Scandinavian or
otherwise), as I presume, shouldn't the buses be packed, not all but
empty? Half-baked and coyly vague, the movie itself, while often very
funny, can be as impassively irritating as its title character.
— Mike D'Angelo