My Life as a Comedian

My Life as a Comedian follows Johan Rheborg’s successful Juha Lindstrom as he’s forced to confront certain events from his past, with the bulk of the narrative featuring a series of flashbacks detailing Juha’s less-than-idyllic childhood. Filmmaker Rojda Sekersöz delivers an almost uniformly tedious coming-of-age tale that boasts few (if any) compelling, attention-grabbing attributes, as My Life as a Comedian’s pervasively (and aggressively) familiar atmosphere is compounded by a roster of almost impressively unlikable characters – with even the central protagonist revealing himself to be a less-than-sympathetic figure whose exploits become less and less interesting as time goes on. And although Sekersöz admittedly does a nice job of establishing the atmosphere of this small ‘70s village, My Life as a Comedian progresses into a frustratingly repetitious and tedious midsection consisting mostly of scenes in which characters are bullied (or decide to bully others) – with the end result a fairly interminable little drama that succeeds at few things it attempts.

* out of ****