Note: the last paragraph reveals the film's ending.

 

"All you need for a film is a girl and gun," Godard famously noted. Norwegian director Bård Breien takes his advice to heart but adds "handicap" to that list for his pitch black comedy Kunsten å tenke negativt  (The Art of Negative Thinking). The film has fun with its premise of depressed and handicapped people battling each other for the title of biggest loser in life and is not half as offensive as the plot summary might lead one to believe. Beneath those handicapped exteriors lie -- surprise, surprise -- personalities who want to love and be loved just like everyone else. Made with modest technical means but an excellent and extremely game cast, the film could be an offbeat choice on DVD before life as a cult item on Nordic TV.

Ingvild (Kirsti Eline Torhaug) has had it with Geirr (Fridtjov Såheim), her cantankerous, wheelchair-bound boyfriend. He sits in his darkened room all day watching Vietnam movies or listening to Johnny Cash records, often with a gun within reach. She forces him to face his inner demons by inviting a group specialised in positive thinking to their extremely fancy home ("we had good health insurance," she offers by way of explanation).

 

The group is made up of Marte (Marian Saastad Ottesen), who is paralysed from the neck down; her boyfriend Gard (Henrik Mestad); 65-year-old Lillemor (Kari Simonsen), reduced to a miserable existence after her divorce from a rich man; Asbjørn (Per Schaaning) a speechless stroke patient, and their group leader Tori (Kjersti Holmen).

The group’s motto: "small changes lead to big changes," and in case anyone wants to get something out of their system they are allowed to scream into the so-called shitbag. Only the shitbag is not big enough for Geirr, who initially refuses to be part of the positive posse and only joins when things -- under the careful mismanagement of Tori -- start to get out of hand and there is a sense of mayhem at work in which he feels at home.

 

Geirr’s philosophy seems to be to exorcise his demons by going through hell -- the exact opposite route of the positive thinkers. When it is revealed that most of the people in the group would also like to go a few steps beyond the shitbag, Geirr and Ingvild’s house turns into a battlefield far worse than the one Geirr loved watching in Apocalypse Now. Breien, who also wrote the screenplay, has some excellent set pieces in store during the course of the film, including a bout of bathroom sex between two unlikely candidates and a shoot-out that is both hilarious and sad at the same time.

 

Breien acquits himself admirably on a small budget by concentrating on the actors and setting most of the action in and around Geirr and Ingvild’s house. The damage of the video cinematography remains limited to the occasional colour bleeds and loss of detail in the darker scenes. Cinematographer Gaute Gunnari mixes handheld and fixed shots to great effect (they are mostly dictated by character behaviour) and also includes a nice crane shot that pans down outside the house from the upper to the lower floors, effective connecting the spaces in the minds of the viewers.

 

Perhaps also because of its large cast, it sometimes feels like one is watching a stage production with too many characters on stage with relatively little to do, which indicates a lack of clearly thought out choreography on behalf of the director and cinematographer. Scenes notably get better when the group is divided into smaller units.

 

Despite an overdose of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, Kunsten å tenke negativt  (The Art of Negative Thinking) is surprisingly tame morally speaking, winding its explosive way to a happy ending that might be considered to pull off two extreme feats at the same time: affirm the status quo for conservative, happy-family thinkers and deliver the ultimate frustration to negative thinkers the world over. For those who always think that things could get worse, a happy ending must be their worst nightmare.

 

 

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