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66th BFI London Film Festival: Laugh

The 66th BFI London Film Festival continues with the “Laugh” section of its program, with the toe-curling Norwegian satire Sick of Myself and the epic Thai bowling comedy Fast and Feel Love.

Sick of Myself (dir. Kristoffer Borgli, Norway)

The World Person in the World was one of the most celebrated premieres of last year’s Cannes film festival, and this year’s Un Certain Regard brought us another Norwegian tragicomedy about the self-destructiveness impulses of Oslo’s residents, following another woman in a deeply dysfunctional relationship. This new film even features a cameo from that film’s star Anders Danielsen Lie, who is granted the privilege of delivering the film’s funniest scene. The tide of acclaim that greeted The Worst Person in the World eventually swept it all the way to the mainstream and awards contention by Hollywood, and perhaps a similar destiny awaits Sick of Myself, a funnier and more acerbic film with a similar degree of artful polish, although it’s certainly a much harder pill to swallow.

Sick of Myself‘s lead Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) actually does far more to earn the title of “the worst person in the world” than that film’s Julie. She’s a pathological attention-seeker who takes the frustration of realizing no one at this dinner party has said a word to or about you since you sat down and the anxiety of fearing you wouldn’t have an interesting response if they had, magnifies it many, many times and sustains it throughout her every waking moment. When an excruciating early scene finds her in just such a scenario, she fakes a nut allergy just to wrestle the spotlight onto herself. “I’m not a narcissist”, she says, narcissistically. 

When her egocentric boyfriend Thomas’s (Eirik Saether) art career begins to take off, she resorts to drastic action to draw sympathy and attention. When transphobes or misogynists make presumptions about people inventing gender dysphoria or sexual assaults for attention, they’re picturing people like Signe. She’s a maximalist version of the kind of self-absorption and lack of empathy everyone in the film displays to some degree, and which our modern attention economy incubates. A lesser film would’ve used social media more prominently throughout the plot, but Sick of Myself adopts a more timeless and less luddite approach, understanding that the real issue lies with us, not our technology. As a result, Sick of Myself feels timely, but avoids the forced, trendy or instantly dated feels of many other comparable satires, achieving a darkly comic character study in the vein of the superb Ingrid Goes West

We might easily tire of watching Signe endless dig down into her hole of lies, but Sick of Myself manages to avoid this sense of repetition, partly by not outstaying its welcome at a comparatively trim ninety minutes and change, but also through the creativity and richness of its writing, populating the world around Signe with an assortment of equally risible characters. Just as the film threatens to run out of steam, it embarks on a third act takedown of performative corporate inclusivity that’s absolutely razor sharp, as Signe and her chic new look are courted by a trendy modelling agency, one that prides itself on its diversity while failing to make its offices accessible to its new employees.

Thomas (Eirik Saether) leads Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) down the street in bitter anger

At the heart of the film’s success is the terrific and likely star-making of Kristine Kujath Thorp as the comically unlikable Signe. Bringing emotional life to such a messed-up character is a great challenge and Thorp rises to it brilliantly, making an inhumanly self-absorbed pathological liar even just a tiny bit relatable. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli includes a number of fantasy sequences that induct the audience into Signe’s shallow desires for fame, adulation and ultimately, simple validation. In one scene, after much coaxing, Signe finally manages to extract a reluctant “I’m proud of you” out of her disinterested boyfriend. The joy on Signe’s face is heartbreaking, and the tragedy of the tragicomic tale finally takes form, as we the audience suspect it’s the only time someone has ever told her that.

Fast & Feel Love (dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, Thailand)

The crowd-pleaser of the day, though, goes to Fast & Feel Love, an exceptionally funny, relatable and extremely wholesome breakup movie via sports movie parody from Thailand. Like Sick of Myself, Fast & Feel Love charts the course of a dysfunctional relationship, though between two infinitely more lovable and endearing people. They are Kao (Nat Kitcharit) and Jay (Urassaya Sperbund), who met in high school but are now both reaching thirty. Throughout their relationship Jay has supported Kao’s passion for Sport Stacking (that game with the cups, you know?) and he is now competing to break the world record. However, though she’s previously been content to look after Kao in the pursuit of his dreams, she’s started to realize there’s a hole in her own life, and that Kao might not be able to take her life where she wants it to go, and her abandoning of him throws Kao’s life into disarray, as he realizes how ill-equipped he is to take care of himself.

Kao (Nat Kitcharit) playing the sport he loves

There’s a lot of different stuff happening in Fast & Feel Love and it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. There are all the constituent pieces one would expect of a romantic comedy drama, and of a sports movie, plus a layer of self-parodic humor thrown over the top, with funny memetic references to a lot of anglophone film franchises: Star WarsJohn Wick, any number of sports movies, and of course The Fast and the Furious to which the title is an overt reference. This sort of shallow reference humor should get tiring but in Fast & Feel Love, it never failed to be charming (Kao getting Parasite-d by his new cleaner is a particular comedic highlight). The directing of Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (who also wrote the script) manages a stunningly impressive job of pulling off so many maximalist visual tropes while still keeping us in the intimacy of the domestic drama and without undermining the poignancy of the emotions, sustaining a sense of comedic playfulness that accentuates the innocence and sweetness of the characters. 

The film wrings a lot of humor out of treating mundane domestic events like big action set pieces, a trope which comes together most consistently in the scenes of competition, where a high-stakes sports even is rendered just slightly ridiculous by the fact the sport is stacking cups against the clock. However, this element to the film feeds very nicely into its central theme, established beautifully in the film’s extremely funny opening. We all have aspirations, some are grandiose, the kind of stuff that our society pedestalizes and most of us won’t get close to achieving, others are smaller, but considered worthy and respectable and are easily accommodated into the preconceived mainstream notions of status. Then there’s things like becoming the best in the world at something ludicrous and arbitrary like stacking cups really quickly. Something objectively dumb but which brings us a sense of pride and personal achievement. And then there’s just living our daily lives, getting things done, and taking care of someone or something else, be it a houseplant, a partner or a child.

Dreams and life goals are all relative, and what seems unimportant to you, might be the most consistent source of joy in another’s life. Fast & Feel Love is about that, about learning it, and about understanding that sometimes life can get in the way of those things and that’s okay. It’s a beautifully non-judgmental film with a lovely moral about leading the life that suits you best without being selfish, and accommodating others in the process. 

Jay (Urassaya Sperbund) and Metal (Anusara Korsamphan) force Kao to learn how to fry an egg)

Kao and Jay are in many respects very familiar archetypes: the obsessive overgrown kid who never properly grew up and the smart, long-suffering girlfriend who dreams of motherhood, these too should feel like lazy sketches. But the performances of Kitcharit and Sperbund are so finely judged, being likable, funny, and sweet. You really root for them both to get what they want, even when they want different things and it’s obvious they’re not going to get them together (after watching Don’t Worry Darling it’s honestly refreshing to be reminded what onscreen chemistry looks like!) Their relationship is sweet, but honestly their breakup is sweeter. You feel the love between them but you also clearly see that it’s not working for Jay anymore and she needs to make a change and fulfil her own needs for once. 

The supporting cast are just as winning, each finding a way to play their larger-than-life characters with enough humanity and warmth for us to invest in their screen-time. Even small scenes that are pretty irrelevant to the overall story and which could easily have been cut like Kao frustratedly trying to teach a kid his math homework are really, really well done. The film didn’t need to give us a scene where Kao gets a glimpse of the fatherhood he doesn’t want, never wrestles with wanting and never brings up again, while giving us an inner life and backstory to a character we’ll never see or hear from again, but it did, and it almost brought me to tears in the process.

It might not be a streamlined, well-paced watch and it may feel off the beaten path for many, but this quirky, wholesome, and once again, extremely charming movie is wholly deserving of cult status and I’d love to see it find its audience. It’ll make you laugh, cry and all those other things movies are meant to do, if you’re going through a breakup yourself, it might just change your life too! I love how this film handles its characters and their messy, deeply personal stories. It has the power to really speak to its audience and I hope it gets the opportunity. It’s delightful! 

Written by Hal Kitchen

A graduate of the University of Kent, Reviews Editor Hal Kitchen joined Film Obsessive as a freelance writer in May 2020 following their postgraduate studies in Film with a specialization in Gender Theory and Studies. In November 2020 Hal assumed their role as Reviews Editor. Since then, Hal has written extensively for the site, writing analytical and critical pieces on film, and has represented the site at international film festivals including The London Film Festival and Panic Fest.

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