September 19, 2008
Another protagonist of last year's Cannes' official selection (on the Un Certain Regard section) and also another possibility, although not likely, for this year's Foreign Language Film's final five (Sweden's representative), You, the Living is one of those films th...( read more)at weren't made to make money or please anyone. Roy Andersson is, as of right now, my favourite filmmaker that no one has ever heard of. A man who has shaken hands and talked with Ingmar Bergman himself.
Andersson's last film, 2000 Cannes prize-winner Songs from the Second Floor, was one of the Festival's most beloved films ever and a miraculous bit of dark comedy in celebration of the human capacity to suffer without losing hope. It was also one of the most unexplainably brilliant films I have seen in my short lifetime. One on which I now regret not having written down some thoughts. Maybe in a near future.
In both cases, the dark yet at turns hilarious take on the state of man in the 21st century is a very successful look at the desperate mess of modern life. An absurdly comic symphony on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life. The film unfolds as a succession of precisely framed long takes with little connection between them. While its predecessor had a anticapitalist spirit and a prevailing mood of apocalyptic despair, Andersson's fourth feature is marginally lighter, even sweeter in tone, and its playful use of music - the ensemble includes a punk-haired guitarist and a Louisiana jazz quartet - turns You, the Living into a sort of ode to the stupidity of daily human existence, with each scene sounding like a solo variation on this theme.
You know that moment that you get now and then when you're sitting in the dark of a theatre, and there's a moment that you didn't anticipate whatsoever that is unmixed, joyfully pure cinematic invention that makes you fall desperately, religiously, almost painfully in love with the film? One of those moments for me happened just about four minutes into You, the Living. Mia, a middle-aged woman sitting on a park bench, laments that no one understands her, not even her boyfriend or her dog. To underline the point, she bursts into song after a near-suicidal speech, which raises the eyebrows of a passer-by peeping through the trees.
The film is basically an hour and a half of such scenes. Vignettes, one might almost call them sketches, in which a not-so-very-large cast of characters pop up in various places without ever forming connections between themselves. A dog, to no purpose, gets dragged helplessly across the screen by an old man with a walker. The aforementioned Mia, now at his boyfriend's mother's house, who is preparing dinner, states that she's happy to be there, only to next call her a sadist for serving non-alcoholic beer with such a nice dinner. "With all the misery in the world, how can we not get drunk?," she asks. A man stuck in traffic recounts the viewers a terrible nightmare he had in which he attended a family dinner of a family that was not his. The party ended with the man being sentenced and strapped to an electrical chair for breaking the family's dishes as the family - still not his - looks on, nibbling on popcorn in anticipation of the execution. A psychiatrist calmly bemoans his finances while being mounted in bed by his wife, who's wearing nothing except for an ancient war helmet. And so on. The result is painfully amusing, frequently random and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.
At other, quieter times - like the man stuck in traffic - they talk directly to the audience about their dreams from the night before, and Andersson goes so far as to visualize these fantasy sequences. The film's final scene (the one with the planes, that you can see on the poster) is of an absolute and indescribable genius. Those sequences, though presented in the same straight-ahead manner, provide some of the film's loveliest and funniest gags. The film's opening scene suggests everything that comes after it might, in fact, be a dream.
I've not mentioned anything remotely resembling a story, you'll note, and that is for the most simple reason: there basically isn't one. The characters in Andersson's films are not so much protagonists as they are recognisable faces in his typical arrangements, always filmed with a stationary camera and an unerring eye for detail.
Filmed in washed-out colours and slightly hazy interiors, the film creates its own parallel and slightly twisted world-view much like Aki Kaurismäki's films. The key to their success, of why their apparent nonsenseness and absurdness actually works, is that their worlds are so recognisable because they reduce the real world to its bare essentials without compromising their characters. Their humour often comes from simple observation of what people around us do every day. The situations are not really absurd, they are simply the insignificant moments from real life presented as the main act, which reveals the real personalities and preoccupations of the people going through them with a clarity that many dramas strive for but rarely attain.
It was a man called Federico Fellini who said that it's always the films that seem the least like films that are the truest to life. You, the Living is the kind of film that Fellini would love if he was here.
Share This Review
