Think Positive Tonight!

GR Film Buff Kiyoko Shiosaki:
I came away from first time director Bard Breien’s film “The Art of Negative Thinking” musing the theme of impotence behind shades of a staged black comedy about a therapy group for the disabled. The omnipresent point of view of Breien’s character Geirr, wheelchair dependent after a car accident, is fleshed out by the surrounding cast of miserable wretches. It felt like a night out at your first adolescent party of misfits rallying “fuck the successful popular people, fuck parents, fuck the authorities” and proceeding merrily on your way to self-pity and destruction. They bond over shared anger and bitter vulnerability, the frustrating impotence of not being able to express yourself, and the utter dependence on ignorant liaisons to translate for you. The romanticism and loneliness of idolized American rebels is apparent in the self-conscious Johnny Cash music scenes and what looks like shots from Vietnam war movies. Geirr’s brilliant cynicism inevitably outsmarts the smarmy therapist and raises a mutiny within the group against the ‘normal’ ones, their partners caught between love and pity. The pairings are almost too perfect—Geirr’s own painful relationship is mirrored by a grotesquely cheerful woman in a wheelchair, and her tanned, guilt-ridden husband. There are gendered contrasts as Geirr’s impotence has different repercussions on his wife. She sleeps in a separate bed, opposite the ethereal grinning vegetable and her oversexed insipid husband. There is also a set up in the works between an incoherent and horny stroke victim and a lonely jilted society wife.

The scenes move like acts in a play and there are cringingly contrived moments, but even after a 20-hour day, I stayed engrossed throughout, straining my dry and burning eyes to keep up with the subtitles of this Norwegian film. The core fury that rises from the pervading impotence and continual humiliation keeps each character precipitously poised to act with both raw and honest contempt and compassion. Seeing this movie is an unsurprising yet exquisitely satisfying celebration to the rebellion against false healing and the hidden malice behind blind hope. Throw on Johnny Cash’s “Cry, cry, cry” and whisper “my love,” in the ear of your sweetheart as you settle in for a feel-good rebuttal to the cult of positive thinking.

See it tonight at 9:30pm at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema, or on the 8th at the Clay Theater. Tickets and info here.