Featured Audience Ratings

• Bob S

  
  I would have love to have seen this on a big screen. I am sure I missed a lot of detail in Roy Anderson's meticulously crafted tableaux on my 27' Sony.

• Rubia Carolina .

  
  <br> The first impression I had watching "Songs From the Second Floor" was of a collection of life metaphors boxed in a surrealistic shape. A slight discomfort. Later on, some scenes insisted on coming back to mind and they amazed me in their… More
  <br> The first impression I had watching "Songs From the Second Floor" was of a collection of life metaphors boxed in a surrealistic shape. A slight discomfort. Later on, some scenes insisted on coming back to mind and they amazed me in their simplicity/originality/reality. <i>Blessed be the one who sits down.</i> This quote is from the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, whose poem "Stumble Between Two Stars" inspired Roy Andersson´s film. "Vallejo created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms. No facile trend setter, Vallejo forged a new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human suffering." Even if it´s not that difficult to be digested, pretty much the same can be said about Andersson´s film that succeeds in portraying Vallejo´s imaginary and our modern and "complicated" human condition. - <i>How are you?</i> - <i>What can I say? It's not easy being human.</i> Life is hard to everyone. But is it really that bad? After sacrificing "the youth", a man drinks and throw ups, drinks again and throw ups. A woman on the floor can't get back up on her stool. It´s easier to keep drinking than to sit down*. Or in Michael Thomson ´s words in a review to BBC, "all activity is pointless". Pointless such as the perhaps obvious, but still great scene at the airport where several people push overloaded trolleys, piled high with towers of luggage. <i>There's a time for misery. But it'll soon be over. Only a few more yards and we'll have left this damned dump under the clouds for good.</i> Obvious or not, we go through life carrying lots of unnecessary things and we´ll still try to take them with us when it comes the time to reach the second floor. *Of course this is not what the scene means; it is just an analogy I made with "sits down" meaning to stop and think on what causes you pain. <br> <br>

• Luke B

  
  I loved some of the ideas presented here, but not so much the cold and empty execution. This is no fault of the film. It is just such a bizarre offering that its last concern is the audience. The film focuses on a bizarre city where time seems to have come to a halt. There are traffic… More
  I loved some of the ideas presented here, but not so much the cold and empty execution. This is no fault of the film. It is just such a bizarre offering that its last concern is the audience. The film focuses on a bizarre city where time seems to have come to a halt. There are traffic jams, and people trying to get somewhere. However, very few seem to know where. One man is scared of the insurance men, after causing a fire, another has trouble with his stomach after an accident at a magic show. It's a film that requires you to sit and study, much like a poem. A lot of it is funny, such as the attention to detail. Seeing a parade of men in the background whipping each other is both unsettling but comical. It may have struck 10 years old, but a lot of the film has to do with accounts, brokers and businessmen. A repeated theme is the cost of business. This is still true, even more so today. Bizarre and interesting, but certainly a challenge.

• Greg S

  
  A series of carefully woven absurdist and magical realist sketches set in a nameless Scandinavian city at the dawn of the millennium where flagellants parade down the street, no one can explain why there's a traffic jam, and a desperate church endorses pagan sacrifices.… More
  A series of carefully woven absurdist and magical realist sketches set in a nameless Scandinavian city at the dawn of the millennium where flagellants parade down the street, no one can explain why there's a traffic jam, and a desperate church endorses pagan sacrifices. Extremely slow paced but rewarding to the patient; the quietly apocalyptic final scene with Kalle standing by the huge mound of discarded crucifixes watching figures on the horizon sticks with you---the image could have come from Bunuel, if he'd conceived it while suffering suicidal depression. Andresson's follow up, YOU, THE LIVING, is basically the same concept, but a bit funnier and more approachable.

• Arash X

  
  Strangely cold & bitter & I mean it when I say strangely, Loneliness, vulnerability, social breakdown & ... Looks like a warning , Anyway has some great scenes

• Curtis L

  
  Um...This movie is crazy. Not in a good way, either. Save yourself 2.50$ and organize your bookshelf or something.

• Eric B

  
  Like it or not, "Songs from the Second Floor" sustains a unique, precarious tone. I suppose it must be labeled a comedy, but it's the bleakest comedy imaginable. Perhaps it's a case of characters being so devastated that the audience is left with no response beyond… More
  Like it or not, "Songs from the Second Floor" sustains a unique, precarious tone. I suppose it must be labeled a comedy, but it's the bleakest comedy imaginable. Perhaps it's a case of characters being so devastated that the audience is left with no response beyond weary, nihilistic chuckles. Roy Andersson's detached portrait of a gray, joyless society introduces multiple characters, but this is a film about snapshots rather than stories. There's the incompetent magician, and the poor man he almost saws in half. There's the furniture salesman who burns down his store for the insurance money. There are his two sons: one ineffectual and lovelorn, the other institutionalized and mute. There's the other desperate salesman, who has decided representations of the crucified Jesus might be the one way to turn a profit. There's the adulterous doctor, and the senile real-estate mogul. There's the bedraggled executive planning to flee town. There are even a few ghosts walking around (naturally, their deaths were violent and unpleasant). Most haunting of all is the quiet little girl who is solemnly sacrificed, presumably as a last-resort ploy to generate prosperity. Meanwhile, traffic is at an apocalyptic standstill, and a pack of urban professionals trudges through town, miserably whipping each other. Are you laughing yet? The narrative doesn't really advance any of these situations. Everyone is stuck. Even the camera is stuck -- it only moves once, and just barely. Most characters are made up to look ghoulishly pale, and this severe, dehumanizing touch makes it hard to even relate to them as people. Nuggets of philosophical wisdom pop up here and there -- "beloved be the ones who sit down," "it's not easy being human," "life is time, and time is a stretch of road," "it's all about buying something you can sell with an extra zero" -- but the script offers no solutions to the desolation it portrays. Clearly, Andersson is an intriguing director. His carefully composed, geometric scenes make extravagant use of deep focus, sometimes to startling effect. A long conference table of withered department heads, a distant field suddenly filling with black-clad people, a procession of travelers pushing overloaded luggage carts...such images are not easily forgotten. But this is such a deadening film to watch. By the time you see an old man vomiting on a bar counter, dripping his yellow spew onto a floundering drunk girl below, you may be wondering if it's time to check out and pop in a Disney DVD instead.

• John B

  
  A wonderful film that provokes the mind. Depressing but nonetheless effective.

• Lesley N

  
  I got a little bored in this, so much so that five days on I can hardly remember what happened. People basically being a little selfish and a little depressing. Maybe I'll watch it in twenty years time and hail it as a masterpiece.. Maybe not.

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