‘Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.’

After reading a rather interesting review of the film in the April issue of Sight & Sound, I later persuaded my local film society to show it, and waitied patiently to see what the eloquent critic Anton Bitel has enticingly described as ‘a litany of human disconnection, misery, frustration and despair’ (1) - but the kind that sees humour in the apparent futility of our day to day mishaps and misunderstandings, binding us together in collective angst.

Conventional narrative is replaced with a series of living tableaux – some short and speechless, others longer and with dialogue – some characters are seen only once, whereas others reappear; occasionally stories are interlinked, others stand alone. Right from the outset, characters are moved to speak directly to the viewer, offering accounts of their dreams. One man is shaken from sofa-centred slumber by a nightmare that airplanes are coming to bomb the city; another, whilst stuck in traffic, takes the time to tell us how he dreamt of a strange dinner party, where he knew no one, yet he sensed they were all relatives. To lighten the mood, he decides (somewhat tragically) to perform the tablecloth trick, despite never having attempted it before in his life. The consequences go far beyond simple humiliation, such is the gleefully absurdist nature of the proceedings. Oh yes; this collection of glum yet witty vignettes is something you want to see for yourself.

I have to admit that the one of the opening scenes – in which a middle aged woman sits on a bench and laments that no one understands her, ordering her boyfriend, plus dog, to leave her alone (but then concedes that she might come round later after being told there’s a roast in the oven) – was a little underwhelming. That she then descends into song only made matters worse. But once she stops the delightfully peppy music kicks in, the scene switches to a lone window, where a gaggle of kitchen staff stare silently out at us. Fade to black – and then, the window once more, this time empty and shot from further away. An elderly man shuffles past, bent over a wheeled Zimmer frame, dragging behind him a twitching dog tangled up in its lead. The tone is set; it’s going to be good.

One of the most striking elements of Andersson’s film is his visual style: everything is in long shot, the static camera moving only once or twice throughout. Every scene is composed like a painting; the heavy ashen make-up and muted (drab) colours serving to enhance this aesthetic. ‘There is more intensity, in my opinion, when you create a picture with not too much contrast concerning colours and even contrasts. I want light that has not much shadow because I want light where people can’t hide in – light without mercy’ (2), considers the director. All interior scenes are shot in Andersson’s studio, enabling him to ‘take away everything that’s not necessary for the picture’. The pared down result is beautifully stark; the lack of fuss allows us to savour the texture of the utilitarian architecture and weather worn streets in all their gritty glory.

Andersson mentions that his work is influenced by André Bazin’s spectator theory (3): the idea of letting the viewer decide what is important in the scene. Indeed, the deep focus and static vantage point encourages the eye to explore the frame. This approach is especially successful in the fantasy of a young woman, Anna (Jessika Lundberg), who dreams she is married to rock singer Micke (Eric Bäckman). The newlyweds relax in their new home: our young bride is unwrapping a gift, her disinterested lover absorbed in his guitar. Slowly, from the view through the window, it becomes apparent that their entire apartment block is moving. Upon reaching a railway platform, they are met by a crowd of well wishers. It is this sly slip from the mundane into the fantastic that is done particularly well; nothing is ever flashy or overly self conscious. Instead, the more surreal elements of Andersson’s gloomy city tend to creep up on its hapless inhabitants, swallowing them whole.

Before seeing the film I was expecting something more along the lines of Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister harmóniák [Werckmeister Harmonies] (2000): slow, brooding camerawork coupled with long, lingering scenes that contain more dead air than dialogue. Although both films share fairly harsh, barren landscapes, their style and tone is altogether different. Living is treated to a buoyant – even jaunty – jazz soundtrack, whereas Tarr’s film goes for something much more sombre and emotive. The distance from Andersson’s characters enables us to see the humour in their relative despair, but it also makes it harder to empathise. In Harmonies, we follow the protagonist on his mildly confusing journey around his bleak, snow-ridden town – his quiet wonder as he examines the whale is matched by our own. One of the most striking elements of Harmonies is the palpable sense of foreboding – something much more muted in Living, where the prevailing feeling is more of weary resignation. Where Tarr’s characters somehow infuse the film with a hushed, waiting, menace, Andersson’s prefer to shuffle around in a much more ineffectual manner. What both Andersson and Tarr have in common is a gift for creating their own unique vision; each of the films in question is a master class in mood and mise-en-scène.

Although perhaps not reaching Bergmaneque levels of awe, there is something of a philosophical core lurking beneath Living’s farce, but it is of a more understated, matter of fact nature than startlingly profound. Whereas Andresson’s Sånger från andra våningen [Songs from the Second Floor] (2000) is said to deal with more political and religious matters (the evils of capitalism, the church, fascism), Living bathes in the banal: during a fantastically impressive storm, one luckless man finds no respite in the overcrowded bus shelter, another repeatedly tries (and fails) to choose the fastest queue to wait in, another runs for an elevator whose doors close just a moment too soon – its occupants unmoved and unresponsive. These overwhelmingly commonplace woes serve to punctuate the more bizarre. In one scene, a stocky woman engages in a spot of passionless intercourse with her scrawny husband: the former dons an antique war helmet and emits sporadic groans of pleasure, whilst the latter lays prone and almost lifeless, save for his lengthy lament about his unfortunate choice of pension plan, little more than a talking (and albeit disgruntled) sex toy. Both figures are, like everyone else in Andersson’s sun forsaken city, blessed with a deathly pallor which lends a further shade of unreality to the squirm-inducing scene.

At other times, the boundary between reality and dreaming is blurred: lovelorn Anna tells us that she dreamed of being wed to her icon (whereas in harsh reality she is cast off after one encounter), yet later we see another Anna – this time more homely in appearance, but with the same hairstyle – wed to a suitably humdrum hubby, who asks her to taste the gravy he is making (a literal request, not a dirty euphemism). We are left to wonder if this is the same girl, and if so, has she dreamed up her chance encounter – casting a svelte version of herself – in addition to her vision of marital bliss?

As the opening epitaph suggests, the film’s players appear to linger at the edge of Lethe’s icy water. Their lacklustre demeanour and resignation – a wearisome journey near its end. There is even a scene in which passengers disembark a tram whose destination is marked as ‘Lethe’ – a further proof that the city is the last stop prior to death. At the bar that features in a several scenes, the bartender is always calling last orders; everything coming to an inevitable close. Indeed, the prevailing mood is one of buttoned down gloom: the players may well be forlorn, rejected and misunderstood, but the seemingly worn-in nature of their jumble of complaints (or the fact that everyone else is equally forsaken) lends an air of futility to their shared existence. In one scene, a psychiatrist bemoans how all of his patients ‘demand’ happiness – and yet no one in the film seems able to muster enough vigour to create their own. Instead, they are doomed to wander around their beautifully grey and misty city in a state of spiritless longing, occasionally bumping into each other, creating sad sparks of anger or disappointment, but little in the way of hope or salvation. Did I mention that it’s also sort of funny? Andersson himself sums up You, the Living as, ‘a farce on the human condition’. ‘Only humour saves us,’ considers the director, reminding us of Charlie Chaplin’s observation that tragedy is comedy when seen in long-shot.

This latest effort has been eight years in the making. Funding was sourced from six countries and, in the meantime, Andersson has paid his bills from his comparatively more lucrative career in advertising. ‘Many people thought it was a shame I didn’t direct real films’, he told Sight & Sound, ‘but in fact it was my good luck – I didn’t get involved in the traditional film community, which always invites compromise’ (5). This refusal to compromise dictates that Andersson has to work harder and wait longer to produce his films (this is his fourth in 31 years) but the result is something distinct and (one would hope) very much his own. It is interesting that Andersson makes reference to André Bazin, who argued that films should represent the filmmaker’s personal vision. Indeed, if ‘auteur’ is still a word that could still be applied to contemporary directors, Andersson would surely make it onto the list of potentials.

Both Songs and Living are apparently part of a planned trilogy – the third is promised to be an ‘enormous, deep and fantastic, humorous and tragic, philosophical, Dostoyevsky film’ (2). Andersson hopes his tour de force will only be four years in the making.

(1) You, The Living (Du Levande) Review, Anton Bidel, Channel4.com, 2008.
(2) Roy Andersson Interview, Matt Bochenski, Little White Lies, 2008.
(3) Roy Andersson - Cannes 2007, Harry Tuttle, Unspoken Cinema, 30 January 2008.
(4) You, the Living by Roy Andersson, Festival de Cannes, 2008.
(5) Reasons to be cheerful, Roger Clarke, Sight & Sound, volume 18, issue 8, April 2008.