This is really the oddest film. I don't mean bizarre but it was odd in its cuts, in its repetitiveness and even in its acting. The comedic elements were strong here, there was amazing depth to the characters and I could see a lot of visuals which had a lot of care taken to be made. Everything from the female sacrifice to the last scene, odd and strange yes, but the atmosphere of dull, monotonous, modern concrete creations was stunning, it made it very enjoyable and yet brought full depth to the movie. I can't help it, I enjoyed this fully.
Without naming the greyish, ghoulish, dull city, one evening a series of absurd occurrences take place there: an uncaring boss , while lying in a gym's tanning machine, orders his servile chief executive to downsize and sack a longtime obedient clerk as redundant, who when fired can't accept his misfortune and reacts by degrading himself; a lost foreigner is violently beaten by passing young thugs just for asking where to locate someone, as the bystanders on a busy street just watch without helping; a magician makes a critical error by sawing deeply into the stomach of an audience volunteer in his sawing-a-man-in-half act; and, the town for no explainable reason comes to a grinding halt in a massive traffic jam and is also experiencing a catastrophic crash in the stock market signaling the possible end to world capitalism.
The main character is a portly, elderly, tired furniture showroom owner Kalle , who has snapped without cause and burned down his business to collect the insurance money. He's despondent and still walks around with his face covered in soot, as he meets his younger struggling son Stefan in an empty restaurant. He's mainly despondent because his older son Tomas wrote poetry until he went nuts and is now catatonic in an mental institution, where he visits and goes berserk because Tomas just stares without recognizing him or saying anything.
There are a few more absurdly comical vignettes. The most striking is a visit by uniformed soldiers to a former army general they served under, who is celebrating his 100th birthday in a luxury nursery home. The frail old timer is sitting up in a hospital crib with a bedpan under him as if imprisoned, while the doctors are expounding to the nurses about his enormous wealth. When a speech is delivered the senile general gives his best wishes to Hermann Göring and offers a Nazi salute. In another scene meant to disgrace the main character even more so, Kalle encounters a former business acquaintance, Sven, in the form of the 'walking dead'?a suicide from whom he borrowed money-- and in a conversation, he relays that he's really glad he's dead because he doesn't have to repay him. Perhaps the film's signature vignette, where it brings despair to the fullest, involves some corporate bigwigs dressed in robes who decide that the way to save themselves and their world of capitalism is by going through a religious-like sacrifice of a young woman. Afterward they sourly meet at the Grand Hotel content to tell themselves they did everything they could to save the world, even offering a ritualisitic sacrifice of the younger generation.
The film argues that Western civilizations' hopes are derived from its economic system and not from its religious beliefs, and if that system failed its citizens they would be left without hope. It's a strangely amusing film and offers to the willing viewer a slice of absurdist Nordic surrealism. Its main problem is that it can't sustain its gimmicky idea throughout, and the 40 or so vignettes all lead to the same kind of apocalyptic insanity and to a sophomoric kind of Beckett-like exchange over humiliation. The film can be best judged in how provoked the viewer was by it as a genuine oddity. Though I didn't find it a masterpiece, I was more than delighted with its comical pronouncements and its overall effect. By DENNIS SCHWARTZ.
Strangely cold & bitter & I mean it when I say strangely, Loneliness, vulnerability, social breakdown & ... Looks like a warning , Anyway has some great scenes
Songs From The Second Floor, is the second feature from director Roy Andersson, whose spent his career making according to fellow swedish director and legend Ingmar Bergman, "The best commercials in the world"(Youtube his name for proff of this). And...(read more)erson takes an advertisers eye to this film and inverts it, into around 40 or 50 short vignettes, some with recurring characters, like the man seen on the cover who has burned down his buisness to collect the insurance but bumbled the job, while most include walkons, and many characters drift in an out of scenes before the movie ends. These short vignettes are nearly all deadpan and absurdist tragi-comic advertisments for peoples lives broken or on the verge of breaking. The antagonist, if there must be one, is capitalism(a subject which the commercial making Anderson is very much aware), and it's de-humaizing effects on all its touches. As bleak as all this sounds, the material is played more often than not for laughs. There's a traffic jam which has clogged the city as if everyone were leaving at the same time, a girl who is blindfolded and lead of a cliff by her village elders, a man accidentally sawed in half by poor magician, men and women in buisness suits walk down streets in paradees flailing themselves as an act of pennance to God so he will prevent the further falling of stocks, and a man followed around by ghosts of freinds and strangers. If that werent enough each scene is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. The movie could be considered a tragi-comic funeral song for western capitalism and modernity(the film takes place just before the new millenium I think), but a tag like that really doesn't communicate how humane, clever, funny, and acessible this movie really is. It's like a lyrical Monty Python film, or a an absurdist Ingmar Bergman, and yet again it's a film all it's own, structurally, conceptually, and aesthetically, if your interested in where film-making may be going in the future and right now, Songs From The Second floor, is the movie to see, and one of the best of the new millenuim
Scandinavian Magic Realism. Roy Andersson has made something thrillingly unique yet owing much to others; Ozu's stationary shots, Tarkovsky's gargantuan takes, Fellini's eye for the odd, Cassavetes's verisimilitude, Bunuel's meaningful nonsense, and ,of course, Bergman's stark bleakness. This film is as disgusting and arresting as it is hilarious. Each scene is only ever made up of a single shot, so traditional ideas of establishing, de-establishing and any other form of conventional editing are wiped clean off the slate to make something keenly unique. One age-old technique it uses to wonderful ends is a variant of the lightning-mix, connecting the scenes together with the music that plays in the background (which also bears a weary, depressed, and yet cheeky and sarcastic tone). Unfortunately in the last ten/fifteen minutes, while each part taken individually is wonderfully superb, they're put together somewhat haphazardly and just don't feel like they fit; the shame is that the near perfect ending just wouldn't be the same without these awkwardly placed scenes. I suppose this could be another thing owing to Fellini: inconsistency. Each shot is amazingly framed and unique, each actor is beautifully deadpan, each cut is jarring and beautiful. This film is, something like von Trier's The Boss of It All, charmingly depressing.
Tragic. Hilarious. Absurd. Those three words fit Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor to a 't.' The film was a success at the 2000 Cannes film festival, winning the Jury Prize and gaining critical accolades internationally. The film is entirely unique, and magical creation of Andersson's mind.
The film follows a number of individuals, some of whom are loosely tied together through personal connections, all of whom share in the existential dread and tragedy of life. We have a magician who nearly saws in half a volunteer, a fired employee, a businessman specializing in crucifixes, and another man who has lost his business to a fire (a fire which he admits he started), his family (including a son who has gone mad from writing poetry), and a series of other characters, not least of which a large congregation of businessmen who walk the streets amid a neverending traffic jam whipping themselves with chains. The storey flows through a vignettes, all captured in long shots by a camera that only moves once throughout the film. The city appears abandoned - save for the traffic jam and roaming flagellants. It's grey and dingy, as abstract a city as could ever be imagined. The people who inhabit it are drab and deathly pale - that the film opens with a man in a tanning bed becomes utterly hilarious in its irony as the film progresses.
There are so many scenes of extraordinary surrealist absurdity that if one was to talk about them all they would need many more pages than available here. Let's consider a few of the most memorable though. In one scene, a woman uses a telephone to explain to someone on the other end that she is stuck in traffic, and cannot get out. She is in a bar; outside we see the line of traffic, moving only as slowly as conceivable without standing still. Everything appears grey, totally abstract as from some world where colours have never been invented. The atmosphere is surreal, and I realize as I describe it I do it no justice at all.
Another brilliant scene involves what appears to be the cities entire population as they gather - businessmen and clergymen alike - to carry out the ritual sacrifice of a young girl, meant to stimulate the stagnating economy. Another excellent scene involves the man who has burned down his store, trying to explain to investigators what he's lost, only to be distracted by the passing hoard of businessmen whipping themselves.
For me however the most amazing scene comes last. In a very long take, we see the crucifix man discard a truckload of his inventory in front of the arsonist. He leaves, and the arsonist takes out his large crucifix and sets it down. We realize that 4 or so individuals have been slowly walking down the road in the background throughout the scene. They've been following the arsonist earlier in the film asking for help. This time he throws a can at them to scare them off. To his and our suprise, dozens of other people seem to pop up out of nowhere from the ground in the surrounding feild. What a shot; it's one of the best I've ever seen, and the camera never moves once throughout its duration.
But I digress. What does it all mean? A quick search of movie message boards will lead you to a number of queries; the dvd also apparantly has a commentary track by Andersson himself discussing and deconstructing the sybolism in the film (I have not seen this yet, and as of now am still unsure if I really want to). The film, I think, a scathing satire of modern society and capitalist realism. It's also about the dangers of mixing superstition and reality. Consider the flaggellating businessmen, self-inflicting pain to stimulate the economy. The sacrifice of the young girl for the same purpose; this also simultaneously highlights how corporations expect us to march towards our deaths each day (ie cigarrettes and alcohol, and so on). The man who burns down his business is shown to be greedy throughout, happy he doesn't have to repay a friend when he commits suicide; yelling at his institutionalized son for not understanding that the purpose of life is to buy something and sell it with one or two extra zeroes.
The paleness of the film often suggests that the city is purgatory, and everyone is actually dead. No one seems to listen, and no one seems to no how to get out. People repeat questions and musings again and again without response.
Andersson has been called the slapstick Bergman, and surely is one of the most interesting products of Sweden. He had pulled a Malick like move prior to Songs from the Second Floor, not making a feature film for 20 some years (although he was active in directing shorts, docs, and commercials). His return was a glorious one though, and one that was entirely original, and entirely inspiring. This is a dark and tragic film, but one that is also funny in that darkest of dark, and absurdest of absurd ways.
The ethics of capitalism are figured in architecture, in the way people compartmentalise and miniaturise their lives, the way they treat other humans, the mechanical way they move. The film's look is updated Kafka - the nightmarish bureaucracy, the endless corridors, where the individual is arbitrarily humiliated, furtively watched by a frightened audience behind adjacent doors. The recurrent motif of the film, besides the endless triangles, is of frames - there is not a single composition that doesn't give onto other frames: windows, doorways, corridors, elevators, streets, etc. - like a kaleidoscope, the mere switching on of a light can radically reconfigure these spatial arrangements. This might seem to open up a very claustrophobic world, suggesting another world beyond the rigid frame we watch; rather, it creates a hall of mirrors effect, one world reflecting itself, in a whole city, society, culture - a never-ending repetition of the same lifeless tableaux that comprise this way of life; a prison literalised in the infantilising case of the senile military commander.
Because this way of life is made to seem natural, feeding into the very buildings in, and gestures with, which people live, its collapse is not sparked by an external force, but results in an implosion of the environment, buildings toppling, the ground tilting like a sinking ship, the body, mind and society breaking down, a whole world grinding towards sterility and inertia.
This is where Andersson's career as the 'world's greatest advertising director' (dit Bergman) comes in. Normally a career in advertising results in films of glossy shallowness. Andersson takes a theme of Fellinian decadence - think 'Satyricon', 'Casanova', 'Ship of Fools' - where a sophisticated society begins to decline, where immutable buildings begin to crumble, crowd hysteria is let loose, where public rites frame primitive barbarism (the sacrifice of young girls to appease the pagan gods) are all filmed like an Ikea advertisement, full of antiseptic sheen.
The film could be described as 'The FAst Show' directed by Bunuel. The narrative consists of connected, but self-contained vignettes or sketches with a recurring set of characters. Most of them would be simply funny jokes in a TV show - the magician who really saws a volunteer's chest etc. All have the concentrated brevity of an advert, all the visual imagination and surprise necessary to capture the viewer's attention. But what the film is advertising is the decline of a soulless consumer society, a society where the minimalist surroundings reflect minimalist humanity, where human relationships (especially in families) are grotesquely alienated.
Despite its post-modern sheen, the film's source are very - gloriously old-fashioned modernist or classic auteurist - Fellini (especially the scene at the airport, where the escapees are bogged down by bulging luggage), Dreyer (the sensitive poet gone mad because of his society); Godard (the apocalyptic traffic jam and barbaric bourgeois behaviour); Antonioni. BUt the presiding spirit is Bunuel, with the 'Milky Way'/'Phantom of Liberty'-like surrealist picaresque narrative, full of bourgeois-baiting and random violence; the 'Exterminating Angel' scene where the civic and clerical worthies are paralysed in the hotel, frothing like distempered dogs; the perverse anti-clericism that convincingly creates a vision of hell climaxing in an ambiguous scene of resurrection (the crouching crowd in the fields) and despair (the rubbish heap of crucifixes).
What Andersson truly shares with Bunuel, however, is a skewed comedy, never letting the Big Themes get in the way of the rich detail - the wonderful scene with the tramp, rats and ex-girlfriend especially. For all its alienated style and dehumanisation, 'Songs', like Bunuel, is devastatingly, humanly angry, and somehow very moving. the meticulous smoothness of the filming actually creates an oppressive violence in the viewer, a desire to smash the whole glasshouse down.
Roy Andesoon is a good Ad-Man, I love this Guy, he' ve made good advertise over 400 spots, and his last movie is You, the Living (Du levande) from 2007. i'll try to download...
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.
Wow, I dreamed about it, but I didn't think anyone would do it. He did every scene in one long, 6 or 10 minute one-er with a stationary camera. For the whole movie--and it was still interesting! I stayed up to be able to watch it in a dark room and didn't lose interest for a second. The cinematography and dense, abstract plot were really great. I loved the allegory, particularly with the swinging crusifix, and the salesman throwing away the crusifixes and running them over. This was probably my favorite scene based on impressive timing and meaningful symble. I want to see more of Roy Anderson. And lets talk about how balsy it is to release a movie unrated in the US. It averages an audience less that NC-17 does, and we're a country that loves our bullshit family values, eh Beaver?
First off, I would definiteley need to see it a second time since there were many details that escaped me on one view. Secondly, while I may not have understood it's meanings completeley, the film managed to keep all my attention and brough entertainment, along with some hilarous scenes.
Dare I say it's just not good. Yes! It tries really hard, maybe too hard. The film's cynical take on the corporate rat race is unmistakable because of tonnes of symbolic imagery stuffed down your throat. It definitely has an offbeat flavour that can be interesting but mostly isn't. This film would be better viewed as a FILM and not a movie because it's more about what it represents and critiques than it is about watching a movie for its own sake.
An odd, very Bergman-feeling Swedish film. It definitely needs a second viewing from me because the symbolism seemed to be going all over the place, but it's a captivating, slow-paced poetic film about the economy, money, religion, and guilt that's definitely worth a watch.
I'll give it credit for being unique, and I will admit that it's rare that I get to see anything as bizarre as this film, but it's not exactly my cup of tea. No characters and story, really. Just a lot of random scenes where unrelated characters are mourning in a city that is dampening into despair. It is depressing, and at its worse, boring. Among these scenes, there are insightful lines about life, the relationship between art and business, the absurdity of living, and some more bizarre scenes.
I love the way it is shot though--with single takes, and the camera never moves. It is as though you were watching people from inside a Petri dish.
piss poor acting and a terrible script makes one of the worst movies ever made, so bad its long past the limit of some movies that were fun to watch due to their badness
Terrible movie. Massive boredome for mast part, then something really weird that affect you somewhat when a little girl is forced to commit suicide by her parents without explanation. Unwatchable.
it's was very weird, very very, unlike anything i have seen before. the camera was just standing there as the actors performed their poetry-like scenes. there wasn't much of a story but the themes were interesting! you should take a look at it if you haven't seen it yet!
Den är smärtsamt bra. Stackars Lasse som inte kan berätta för sin fru att han förlorat jobbet efter trettio år. Stackars hans fru. Stackars människor som strävar på och försöker komma någon vart för att få mat på bordet och ha det lite trevligt. Det är en underbar film. Mörk och apokalyptisk, kan tyckas, men aldrig elak eller kall -- det finns en ständigt närvarande ödmjukhet och lojalitet med karaktärerna som får dem att bli olidligt mänskliga, humoristiska och bräckliga. Men samtidigt starka på något sätt. En film att älska; att skratta och gråta till. Tack Roy.
Like a moving poem, this movie will trnsport you somewhere else. The camera is always steady and that allows you to see this movie as if you're watching a paint in the wall. You will not forget this movie.
MCT:August 14, 2008
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