Sick of Myself

Director; Kristoffer Borgli (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France). Year of Release: 2022

A posh restaurant. A fawning waiter offers the young couple at the table a $2,300 bottle of wine. The man takes it, asking if he can pour and keep the cork. The expensive wine is worth it, he says, as it’s his partner’s birthday. When the waiter leaves the table, the man tells her to go outside and pretend to take a phone call. She dithers, leaves, and then returns when the waiters bring her a lighted dessert while singing “happy birthday”. The burning candle on top takes an age to die out.

The man tries to persuade his partner to leave again. After all, he doesn’t want to be saddled with a bill he can’t afford. She reluctantly leaves, but only after he promises her that she can tell the people at the party that they’re going to that this was all her idea. As she dawdles outside, suddenly the man rushes out, bottle of wine in hand. The waiter follows him, then returns, all the time unaware that the woman he is walking past is the one who he was so recently serenading.

If this makes you think that this film is going to be a celebration of the little people getting one over swanky restaurants and their owners, you’re going to be disappointed. Signe and Thomas live in a huge house, largely paid for, you suppose, by his status as an emerging artist. When she says to someone at a party that its only narcissists who become materially successful, they ask her “so how come you’re still working in a café?”

Signe takes self-absorbed narcissism to another level. The party is full of vacuous yuppies, but somehow she stands above them. Her idea of smalltalk is to tell someone “People tell me all the time, ‘You should start a podcast. You’re so naturally funny,’” (Plot spoiler: she isn’t). At another posh meal, Signe pretends that she has a nut allergy just so that the waiters will make a fuss of her. Everyone ignores Thomas saying that she has nothing of the kind.

One day in the café, a woman wanders in from the street, dripping in blood. Signe helps her and holds her, despite this meaning that her white t-shirt gets soaked in the blood. We see Signe telling the police and anyone who cares to listen that she was the only person who offered any help – everyone else just stood back. Then, the scene is repeated to show what really happened, and we learn that what Signe says and what actually takes place are not necessarily the same thing.

As Thomas is invited to exhibit in a big gallery and the fashion magazines want to take his picture, Signe reacts first bitchily, and then looks at how she can regain the attention of their odious social circle. Chancing on a news report about an illegal Russian drug which causes facial deformities, she orders a job load and starts popping them. Signe is going to be noticed and she doesn’t care how, even if it means causing long term damage to her health and looks.

It is clear that Sick of Myself is satire, and is not to be taken entirely seriously, but who exactly is it satirising. The drug dealer who lives with his mother? The agency which has spotted an eye in the market and employs only models who do not look conventionally beautiful? The blind woman who is employed by the agency to show that they have diversity, but who keeps dropping glasses of water onto the floor after someone has moved them?

At first glance, you might feel that the film is punching up at the superficiality of the fashion industry, but there is something nasty in the way it also laughs at the female models (all the real villains are women). While Sick of Myself is apparently poking fun at self-indulgent bourgeois who embrace victimhood to make themselves noticed, there is an insidious implication that anyone who is challenging the “natural” order of things is just seeking attention for themselves.

This reactionary undercurrent may be there, or I may be reading something into the film which doesn’t exist. Either way, there are other limitations. This is not Signe’s first experience of lying just to stay the centre of attention. Someone mentions the time when she told everyone that she only had 9 toes. Then Summer came, she went out in sandals, and that tale was blown. As the film goes on, other people recount similar stories. So why are they so keen to believe her every single time?

Yes, I know that we are exaggerating for effect, that Signe and her friends are all obnoxious dumb yuppie scum. Let’s just sit back and laugh at their misfortunes. But for me, they are just not interesting enough for me to want to spend so much time in their company. The ridiculous implausibility means that what is supposed to be biting satire about the shallowness of modern society, ends up repeating the same joke that the rich are superficial over and over again.

Ultimately, the film’s success or failure depends not on whether it gets the politics right, but on what it feels like to sit through from beginning to end. And for me, it ends up being just as insubstantial as the people it is trying to mock. This is basically a one premise film. The premise is interesting enough – for maybe the first half hour – but it lacks the depth for us to build the whole film around the fact that Signe is a bit needy.

I suppose it’s the sign of something that there has been a lot of this sort of film lately – from Triangle of Sadness to The Menu to all sorts of other stuff which left no lasting impression on me. And this is the problem with many of these films, including this one. It is presumed that it is sufficient just to poke fun at the shallow rich without offering any gravitas of your own. Meanwhile ticket sales rise and rich film distributors gleefully count the profits.