受够了自己

The latest practitioner in filmic social satire, Kristoffer Borgli, like his contemporaries Joachim Trier and Ruben Östlund, is also from Scandinavia, he is Norwegian. SICK OF MYSELF is his second feature in which he sinks his sharp teeth into an extreme case of narcissistic personal disorder, which he marries strikingly with the body horror grotesqueries. Then he follows it with DREAM SCENARIO, an A24 produced, Nicolas Cage starring Hollywood calling card, hinges on a high-concept crochet that Cage's middle-aged professor, apropos of nothing, appears in many people's dreams, and how he navigates the instant fame and its underside, while leaving the phenomenon's inexplicability in the lurch. In Oslo, Signe (Thorp) and Thomas (Sæther) is a young couple bound in a toxic relationship. Signe is the often ignored one while Thomas is a rising artist with a kleptomaniac penchant. Working as a barista and desperate needs validation, Signe's antics to get attention, including stealing the limelight from the self-absorbed Thomas, become increasing awkward and radical. From faking an allergy to voluntarily abusing a drug which can cause skin abnormality, Signe finally gets what she wants, attentions not only from Thomas, but also from the society at large. Her dysmorphia - a thunderstruck achievement from the make-up and prosthetics team (headed by Dimitra Drakopoulou and Ida Astero Welle), she shall be roundly cast in the re-re-booted Fantastic Four from Marvel - attains its newsworthy coverage and gets her a modeling opportunity for an unorthodox agency, but all is not well, the drug's pernicious effect begins to take a toll on her health. Borgli's satire takes an ambivalently unregenerate stance in the end after Signe comes clean with her self-destructive jiggery-pokery. SICK OF MYSELF doesn't conduce to a comfy viewing. Signe and Thomas are two rather repugnant characters that are cut from the same cloth, borderline sociopathic, attention-seeking and blindly self-serving, which may well justify their co-dependency. As actors, Thorp, although resolute and plucky, is weighed down by Signe's hard-edged pretension whereas Sæther cannot register more than an air of faux-airiness that might be what the director wants. While Borgli's social commentary is biting and accurate, he is quite inept at constructing character arcs, both Signe and Thomas are constants in terms of their behavior patterns and mental states, there are no learning curves. That could be a current Scandinavian trait, a frigid aloofness that also penetrates the films of Trier, Östlund and Ali Abbasi. As if the manifesto is "we are awful people, that's our raison d'être!", Signe can truly gives Joachim Trier's THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021) a run for its money to claim the title. In DREAM SCENARIO, Cage's Prof. Paul Matthews is an obverse of Signe. He is semi-content in his ivory tower until a sudden fame involuntarily catapults him into a trending celebrity, which he manages to milk for his own advantage. But as a proverbial knowledge, fame cuts both ways. When his virality turns even more bizarrely threatening and negative, is he capable of reconciling with it? Similarly, Borgli's script opts for a noncommittal way to wind up Paul's plight, and Cage's participation also harks back to the star's own notoriety as an internet meme years ago. But it is irksome when the ending arbitrarily cranks up the weird "dream scenario" to commodification without explicating Paul's phenomenon. All of a sudden, one can purchase the experience to enter another person's dream, but the grounds about our "patient zero" is frustratingly unforthcoming, the leap of scientific and technological advancement leaves an oceanic lacuna in Borgli's script. Cage, resorting to play a neurotic ordinary Joe with baldness and humble get-up, evokes his two-fold performances in Spike Jonze's ADAPTATION. Here, he is even more anal-retentive as if assuming a Woody Allen-esque persona, and saddled with an unsavory encounter with a young woman Molly (Gelula) who coyly proposes him to re-enact the sex act in her dream (a proposition Paul doesn't resist against his best judgement and of which he makes a pig's ear). Paul is more sympathetic than Signe in SICK OF MYSELF, but not by much. Julianne Nicholson is overqualified to inhabiting Paul's garden-variety wife Janet, conveying that she is not going to stick around if he is in a spot. Michael Cera is quite persuasive and funny as the marketing-savvy, product-placement-oriented Trent, one only wishes he would have had more sceneries to chew as a contrast to Paul's clodhopping reactiveness. Both SICK OF MYSELF and DREAM SCENARIO are incentivized by Borgli's admixture of horror elements (body horror in the former and nightmarish jump-scare in the latter) injected into the stories's absurdity and black humor, which can be deemed a unique aesthetic on Borgli's part. Be that as it may, Borgli is no wunderkind, his keen sensibility to the signs of our times and a certain degree of facility in filmmaking aside, he has yet hit the bull's eye in his story-telling, in which there are bright ideas aplenty, yet to transubstantiate them into a script with coherence and credibility is something he should strive for. referential entries: Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE (2017, 7.9/10); Joachim Trier's THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021, 8.0/10); Spike Jonze's ADAPTATION. (2002, 8.3/10); Ari Aster's BEAU IS AFRAID (2023, 7.2/10); Ali Abbasi's BORDER (2018, 7.1/10).

English Title: Sick of MyselfOriginal Title: Syk pikeYear: 2022Genre: Drama, HorrorCountry: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, FranceLanguage: Norwegian, Swedish, EnglishDirector/Screenwriter/Editor: Kristoffer BorgliMusic: TurnsCinematography: Benjamin LoebCast:Kristine Kujath ThorpEirik SætherFanny VaagerSteinar Klouman HallertSarah Francesca BrænneFredrik Stenberg Ditlev-SimonsenHenrik MestadAndrea Bræin HovigFrida NatlandAnders Danielsen LieIngrid VollanSeda WittTerje StrømdahlRating: 6.9/10

Title: Dream ScenarioYear: 2023Genre: Comedy, HorrorCountry: USALanguage: EnglishDirector/Screenwriter/Editor: Kristoffer BorgliMusic: Owen PallettCinematography: Benjamin LoebCast:Nicolas CageJulianne NicholsonDylan GelulaMichael CeraTim MeadowsDylan BakerKrista BridgesKate BerlantLily BirdJessica ClementPaula BoudreauDavid KleinStar SladeCara VolchoffNoah CentineoNicholas BraunAmber MidthunderLily GaoRating: 6.5/10