Cannes Review: Kristoffer Borgli’s ‘Sick Of Myself’
23.05.2022 - 01:23
/ deadline.com
Timing can be cruel. Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s second feature, Sick Of Myself, has the misfortune to arrive in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in the slipstream of Ruben Östlund’s divisive but funny competition title Triangle of Sadness; the latter being a broader, sillier but much more brutal dissection of class and culture. Sick Of Myself also has to compete with the unexpected longevity of fellow countryman Joachim Trier’s hit The Worst Person In The World, which last year went from the Cannes competition all the way to the Oscars.
The net result is that despite another great, gutsy central performance from Ninjababy star Kristine Kujath Thorp, Sick Of Myself won’t get the attention it might have had in previous years, which is a shame since there are some interesting ideas in the mix here and some dark laughs to be had.
Thorp plays Signe, a young woman whose boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) is a conceptual artist with a sideline in kleptomania (in the film’s somewhat misleading opening scene, we see the pair conspiring to steal a very expensive bottle of wine from a restaurant). Both are struggling, and Signe works in a coffee shop where the mundanity of everyday work is suddenly shattered when a female customer is mauled by a savage dog. Signe comes to her rescue and heads home in a daze, still covered in lashings of the other woman’s blood. It’s subtly expressed, but the attention she receives — from the police, the people she passes, and subsequently the media — plants a seed.
Later, when Thomas has unexpectedly become a rising art star with his weird compositions, some of it made from stolen furniture, Signe attends a fancy dinner in his honor.
Uncomfortable with the fact that
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.