I have seen this film described as "plotless" but that is not accurate. It is true that the film consists of 31 different vignettes, none lasting longer than a few minutes, that feature different people in different situations in different locations but there is certainly an overarching idea to Andersson's collection of seemingly unrelated narratives. A few characters recur but for the most part, we hop not only between locations but between time periods as well. Contemporary scenes at, for example, a train station, a food market, a bar, or on a crowded bus flow around scenes of WWII POWs marching through snow, an aerial view of an embracing couple floating over a bomb-ravaged Cologne (this vignette used for the poster, above, recalls Chagall's gorgeous 1913 painting Over the Town), even a brief view of Hitler's last moments in his bunker. The juxtaposition of daily--even banal--life (a father stops in the rain to tie his young daughter's shoe, a couple sit on a park bench and watch a formation of flying geese, a new grandmother snaps photos of her grandbaby) with the kind of horrors humankind is capable of creates a breathtaking kaleidoscopic perspective of life on this planet, a celebration of each moment big and small and a regard for the singular beauty embedded in our existence. But deftly and subtly intertwined with this profundity is a certain dark humor, a wry sense that finds absurdity in the banality and horror. The paradox of being alive. All in 76 minutes.
The closest the film comes to explaining itself is in a cute scene between two young college students, sitting in a nearly empty flat. While a young woman sits on a bed, a young man reads a text book and relates to her a startling fact he has just learned: that the first law of thermodynamics states all matter and energy can never be destroyed, only transformed. Therefore, he posits, none of us can ever end...all of our "energies" are never-ending. Endless.
The look of "About Endlessness" is a marvel too. A washed out color palette of neutrals, greys, and beiges provides an oppressive sense ("Oh, how daily life is..." Anton Chekov once remarked). His characters often sport white-powdered faces as though they are specters or ghosts in their own lives. But most astonishing is the fact that Andersson creates every single set on a soundstage, even the ones that seem to be outdoor locations like a soccer field. The labor-intensive process of creating these sets takes a month or more. Andersson himself says, "With 'About Endlessness' I want to continue to develop a cinematic language that is pared-down, simplified, refined, distilled, or however you choose to describe it. That’s what I mean by the expression abstraction. I strive to achieve that refinement, that simplification that is characteristic of our memories or our dreams. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve this using a classic 'shooting on location' aesthetic. I have always preferred, and still prefer, to create and shoot all the scenes in a studio. It’s very costly and time consuming, but I feel that it’s worth it." I concur, as it gives "About Endlessness" its own controlled vernacular, almost as though we are watching one of Matthew Barney's art/sculptural films.
Recommend? Absolutely. And if such a film strikes you as "art house pretension," give it a go anyhow...with its short running time, it is enough time to dabble to see if the film resonates with you without investing hours.
https://www.royandersson.com/eng/endlessness/
No comments:
Post a Comment