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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
YOU, THE LIVING Roy Andersson’s You, the Living drifts far away from any dogmatic intonations that its stern title implies. In its own droll, carefully composed way, it’s a loose, playful smorgasbord of over 50 vignettes, some of which fly by in a matter of seconds. It could be described as absurdist, except that the world the huge cast inhabits is immediately recognizable, from a fluorescent-lit bar packed with barflies to a sterile boardroom to Spartan apartments. I’m not certain if there’s one overall theme, but even if Andersson dispenses with connected logic, his film feels cohesive. The director describes it as a study of man’s fascination with man, and as “a mosaic of human destinies.” Okay, I’ll go with that since many of the sequences, some transparent and others opaque, are too sprawling to summarize. Indeed, there’s something here for everyone—deadpan comedy, some (revenge) drama, and definitely the surreal, including a technically brilliant pièce de résistance. Anna (Jessica Lundberg), an apple-shape-faced waif, recounts to the camera her fantasy honeymoon with her enigmatic god, an electric guitarist. Then we see her sitting on a bed in her wedding dress in the background, her dream husband serenading her with his guitar in the foreground, while her apartment begins to literally move, with the world outside increasingly rushing by her window. The camera work and the technical logistics involved will call attention to itself (you’ll have to wonder how this long take was filmed), but the audience will share the moony groupie’s wonderment. But what is astonishing to Anna about her reverie is the kindness of well-wishers, who “wanted the best for us,” not that her abode is somehow transported. Here and elsewhere, Andersson finds very human moments amidst an elaborate visual conceit. He plants his camera as an observer, which occasionally is used as a confessor/therapist, and through the use of deep-focus wide shots, it keeps its distance. With a color scheme painted from the drabbest of color palettes—mostly dingy brown, green, and gray—the look may suggest Otto Dix, but the urban melancholy belongs to Edward Hooper. Likewise, Andersson’s tableaus of the everyday are full of feeling, especially from the women (probably after a drink or two). The most common complaint of his characters is: nobody understands me. Some are miserable. An elementary school teacher breaks down at the start of her class; her husband had called her a hag. In the next scene, a carpet salesman crumbles before customers; his wife had called him an old fart. That’s as about symmetrical as it gets in an otherwise capricious film, where Andersson bounces from one idea, tone, and setting to another. In a singularly odd scene, a zaftig woman straddles a man so pale he looks like a corpse. He talks of financial woes, she moans. This banal bedroom banter is followed by one of the film’s more linear scenarios—the racially-tinged encounter between a businessman in a hurry and an Arabic barber. Near the
end, one woman, bathing in a tub, sings of a land without grief. Even if
her dream is pie in the sky, her wistfulness brings the movie back down
to earth. But you won’t feel like you need a drink, no matter how lonely
the character on screen, considering a raucous New Orleans jazz band
pops in and out of the vignettes.
Kent Turner
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