The icy glare of Swedish Nouvelle Vogue

Maurizio73

Two teenagers, Par and Annika, meet by chance during a visit to their relatives guests to a nursing home. Born among them a tender feeling growing in the background of a thin family distress and social impact, including regrets and recriminations of older people and betrayed the expectations of the most 'young people, along the dividing line of a generational crisis that is a mirror and reflection of a country that seems to have lost their national identity. In cold and distant reverberations of a remote Swedish Summer, director Roy Andersson seems to chase the chimera of a 'New Cinema' which (belatedly) aims to public attention through a Scandinavian vigilant attention to the events of the younger generation (teenagers who imitate American riders between leather jackets and juke box), not failing, however, to return the existential sense of a profound inability to communicate like a worm that eats away hopelessly family relationships and decreasing the aesthetics of the new impulses that had troubled European cinema in the previous years in the context mature and aware of non-trivial analysis of social relations and of an irreversible crisis of values, as happened in those years with the extraordinary exploits of Michelangelo Antonioni. Andersson attempts to capture the chorus of this social dimension through the use of medium shots that collect the plurality of appearances that fill the screen as an overview on the evolution of human relationships, often dropping the camera eye on the detail of the first plans from which we grasp the sense of a shared personal pain that makes collective grief (the grandfather crying at the beginning of the film claiming the imprisonment aware of the existence of a terminal condition, the young Eva who confesses his granddaughter premature failure of a personally and professionally project , the hysterical laughter of John shows that the sense of a contemptuous unbearable frustration individual). Against the background of this social and cultural discomfort you shake the manifesto of this new cinema, overlap the 'wave' of this generational aesthetic where you insert the delicate dialectic of a theory of looks that weave the plot of a visual approach, the bitter lust a sweet discovery sentimental, the return in motorbike without headlights in a twilight full of hopes. Striking the ending where in the delirium of ethyl salesman refrigerators will raise the desperate cry of a social failure as a prelude to the final tragicomic in the morning fog, a new sad homecoming. Cinema of passage, between the cold nihilism of a generational disenchantment and the silence of a domestic in communicability family, which returns the thickness of a work that collects 5 nominations and 4 awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970. The icy glare of Swedish Nouvelle Vogue.

score 7/10

Maurizio73 15 June 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2813150/