I popped this one in at around midnight. It was called The Bothersome Man and I vaguely remembered parts of it. I got a physical copy from Netflix a few months back and I could clearly recall the first few minutes of it; Expressionless Norwegian man is standing by the tracks of the subway. At a distance, a couple is sucking face with their eyes open. They are staring at nothing and kiss with the passion of robots. The smacking sounds of their lips and dry tongues seem to bother our lead role, who is probably thinking about love. His name is Andreas and his eyes reveal nothing besides that he is empty. As the subway approaches he jumps into the tracks. This much I had seen before.
Comes the intro and Andreas is dropped in the middle of nowhere. Looks like a desert. Very un-European landscape. Someone unceremoniously has placed a banner reading WELCOME outside an empty run down gas station. An old man in a small car comes and picks him up. Andreas just goes along with his blank stare into nothing. They drive through what looks like a vineyard. Eventually they drive into the city. It could be so many European cities. There for hundreds of years and heavily contrasting the classic edifices with the cold metallic angles of new buildings. Andreas is dropped in an apartment complex and is told that he has a job to go to the next day.
His new place has all the amenities one needs but is sterile as fuck. The next morning Andreas heads to work. He is shown a small office with a big window. There is a computer. We know he is an accountant but he is given no instructions. He is assured he will have everything he needs there. I doubt it is the Norwegian physique but in this company everyone is fatless. Employees walk around with little to say. If the movie has been as minimal as its images thus far, then the plot turns bizarre and existential.
Outside his place of work, directly under his office window a man has jumped to his death. Impaled in several spots across the body his entrails have spilled onto the pavement. Passers by do not flinch. A couple of men in gray jumpsuits come and clean up the mess.
If there is something to notice here is that Andreas is not a man in control. Situations keep on happening to him and he is totally passive. While cutting papers at work he purposely sticks his finger under the blade. Maybe he wants to feel something. When his finger falls to the floor and the bleeding starts he freaks and collapses. His coworkers look at him bewildered but they are so unmoved by the blood they may not be aware of it. A little later Andreas notices that in fact, he’s got all ten fingers.
At night he goes to a bar and after several drinks, preoccupied with his sobriety he questions a man lying on the floor of the bathroom. ‘Why am I not drunk?’ Someone else answers from a toilet. He has found someone with whom he shares the same questions. Andreas follows the man home. The man lives in a basement with one of those small windows adjacent to the sidewalk.
Things start to look up a little when he asks a woman out. She is beautiful if only expressionless and cold. They go to dinner, they fuck, they move in together and decorate their home in such a minimalist fashion there is barely any furniture. They make plans and have dinners with friends but is all so calculated. When his train of thought varies slightly from the mundane she puts him into his place and basically tells him to shut the fuck up.
Andreas is clearly bored. He asks a blonde coworker out. They go to the movies. He cries, maybe moved by the emotions of the film and by the lack of emotion in his life. Then, Andreas tells the girl he did not like the film. They go for ice cream. Hard not to chuckle at the size of the cone. So small it would look like a joke to most Americans. They kiss. Hard. For a second there we can see lust in their bodies. It’s almost as if Andreas is finally finding something his life needs.
When Andreas talks to his wife about breaking up because he has fallen for another woman, she barely responds him. Instead, she reminds him of a get together they have planned for the weekend. Things turn for the worse when Andreas informs his blonde coworker that he is leaving his wife because he wants to be with her. She is OK with it if he is OK with it, in essence, whatever he wants is ok, but his move has triggered no real emotions. Then, she asks him if she has to stop sleeping with the other three men she has been screwing. Her reactions frustrate Andreas to no end, who dissapointed heads to the subway station and commits suicide. Like three times. His body gets slammed by trains and dragged for long distances. Mangled but unbroken, he gets up and is quickly rescued by the men in gray who rescued the man who had jumped to his death.
This is just about half of the film. It keeps on getting wonderfully weird with our lead man Andreas searching for feeling in a place where everyone is cold, content and void of any real emotions.
This is just about half of the film. It keeps on getting wonderfully weird with our lead man Andreas searching for feeling in a place where everyone is cold, content and void of any real emotions.
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