Life isn't funny. (Or is it?)

theshanecarr

This is the first film by Roy Andersson that I have seen, and little did I know the strange treat that I was in for. I can't speak for his other movies but if, like me, you haven't seen any of his previous work, take a chance on this.

I'm conditioned to expect a narrative so when I realised that what I was watching was a series of mostly unrelated vignettes, I had to adjust my expectations. The film teaches you how to watch it.

The vignettes, written and directed by Andersson, are largely scenes from everyday life in which people seem to be trudging through a drab, unending routine when something, some shock, interrupts their life.
In one a man calls out to a man he has not seen in years who ignores him, in another a man apparently angry about his wife talking to another man begins to slap her, in another a man simply has trouble starting his car.
But it isn't all sad, annoying, or depressing - there are moments of sweetness and kindness too; a father stops to tie his daughters shoelace in the rain, or a trio of girls stop outside a cafe playing music and begin a joyful dance.

One of the few recurring threads through the movie is a priest who is losing his faith. We see him hit the communion wine out of sight of his parishioners. We see him pleading with a psychiatrist to tell him what to do (The shrink's response; "I have to catch my bus"). We begin to realise no help is coming. We are alone, and our response to that can be terror, or it can be laughter.

The scenes seem like they could taking place today so it comes as a shock when one is set in the closing hours of the second world war as drunk and defeated Nazi officers can barely rise to greet their leader; a Hitler, who stares uncomprehendingly at the dust shaking down from the ceiling as bombs pound overhead. (Kukriniksy's painting "The End of Hitler" brought to life.)

That sense of a painting being brought to life pervades every sequence. Almost all of the scenes have a deep depth of focus to them, with backgrounds stretching into the distance, and every part of the scene rendered in loving detail. I don't know how this is achieved but I know it's the only film for which I moved to sit right beside my big screen tv so as to be better able to take it all in (For which I was rewarded with the most exquisite detail.).

Beyond that attention to each inch of the picture, other formal conventions make themselves known across scenes ; characters with a uniformly deathly pallid complexion, static camera shots that push you to examine the edge of the frame where the action often begins, a voice over in which a near-emotionless woman tells us what we are about to see as if recounting a memory; "I saw a woman who had problems with her shoe". (And indeed she does.)

In one scene, a boy looks up from his reading to tell a girl that the first law of thermodynamics suggests that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another, and so perhaps in a thousand years, she will be a potato. She takes this in stride and advises "I'd rather be a tomato." That's about the tone of it.

Perhaps Andersson is telling us that, if God is there at all, he views our lives and our foibles through a dispassionate, ahistorical, lens with little use for characters, or their fleeting concerns, and he finds it all drily, darkly amusing.

score 9/10

theshanecarr 28 January 2021

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6538025/