The Bothersome Man (2006)

Jens Lien’s dystopian dream is as Kafkaesque a film as I can recall. The solitary hero Andreas moves through an inexplicable world, sterile, corporate, irrational, and his physical suffering — a lopped off finger, several run-overs by the subway — disappear magically. 

The urban landscape is grey, concrete, a world stripped of taste, colour, smell, any sensual engagement. The sex is easy but empty. He assumes ardor where there is only bemusement. He has an easy success at work as well as with women, nice office, sports car, nice flat, easy affairs. But his dissatisfaction reawakens when he remembers sensations, when he misses children. 

The corporate and Ikea-furnishing city is a kind of penal colony. Escape is impossible. When he digs a tunnel into a colourful kitchen in the outside world, he’s dragged back with but a mouthful of -- Danish.”Everyone here is happy,” he is admonished, before he is brutally carried out and dumped into the more problematic but enlivening reality.

     The opening shot is of a couple in a subway station kissing ravenously. Andreas watches them, unsettled not so much by their passion — we will later deduce — but by their disengagement. Their mouths work as if sucking out lobster but their eyes keep springing open as if even that pretence at passion can’t make them feel alive.
     The film excoriates the welfare state which provides the basics in a deadeningly easy way but stifles individual assertion.