Just watched...

...an extraordinary little film with a big subtext, "About Endlessness" from 2021 by Swedish director Roy Andersson.

Somehow the films of Andersson have passed me by until now. He is the auteur who created "the Living Trilogy" of films: "Songs from the Second Floor" (2000), "You, the Living" (2007), and "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" (2014). And now, at 78 years of age, he has created the distillation of his body of work, a film that, at a scant 76 minutes, manages to pack in the meaning of existence in this universe.

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/

Just watched...

..."You, The Living" by Swedish director Roy Andersson.

Although this film was made in the lovely, picturesque country of Sweden between 2004 and 2007, it feels colorless and oppressive, as though it was filmed somewhere in eastern Europe in 1980. The film has the bleak, unadorned look of Poland or Czechoslovakia in the 60s/70s. Helping that illusion along is the general look of the film: characters live in tiny shabby flats, people walk grey streets bisected with slowly lurching trolleys, and the whiff of brutalist architecture is in the air. The filmmaker, Roy Andersson, chose to use very little contrast and to light the hell out of each scene, eradicating any hint of shadow. The result is flat and unrelenting; everyone is exposed, both literally and figuratively.

Despite their sad, exposed surroundings, or perhaps because of them, the characters in this film display a range of humanity that is funny, touching, and profoundly relevant to the human condition. Fifty short vignettes at first seem random until we catch on that the crying wife whose husband upset her that morning is married to the man we are seeing in another scene. The people we see randomly practicing their band instruments are actually part of a group who play at a funeral later in the film. This kind of jigsaw puzzle way of noticing that we are all interconnected is a charming device. Some characters break the fourth wall and talk directly to the camera--and to us, the audience. Some characters tell us their nightly dreams. In this way, the film reminded me of Buñuel's brilliant "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" in which a succession of dreams are told at various dinner tables.

Andersson cast his film, save for one role, with non-professional actors, many of whom were recruited by Andersson or an assistant right off the street. This also helps the verisimilitude of the film.

The film's title comes from a line from ROMAN ELEGIES by Goethe: "Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot." In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the five rivers that flow through Hades, and is the river of forgetfulness and oblivion, where dead souls drank to forget their mortal lives. Perhaps this line is a reference to the seemingly dour lives these people lead. It could be advice: enjoy what you have now. Or it could be a reference to the puzzling ending in which what they have now might very well be taken away.

Recommend? Absolutely.