Venice has become the Elysium for Roy Andersson, in 2014, A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE won the Golden Lion statuette and five years later, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, his sixth feature, snatched a BEST DIRECTOR Silver Lion.
A PIGEON… is the third installment of Andersson's "Living" trilogy, following SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) and YOU, THE LIVING (2007), but after the advent of ENDLESSNESS, that statement seems to nominal, because ENDLESSNESS can be rightfully viewed as a farther extension of A PIGEON….
They are formally and structurally “tableaux films”, consist of vignettes lensed through a stationary camera, each one is a long take lasting for several minutes, featuring actors moving glacially (if they are ambulatory) and uttering often repetitive lines (“I’m glad to hear that you are well” x2 is the default cellphone exchange) under warpaint of pallor. The performance is deadpan with distancing effect, and the films barely contain any connective plots.
In A PIGEON…, two traveling novelty salesman Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom) are the token leads, their 3-fold merchandize is too dreary to enliven anyone's life, which is enfolded in multifarious sketches, off the top of yours truly's head, notable ones include the three incidents about death in the beginning, a rotund flamenco teacher relentlessly fondles her student, a poem indicates the film's title, a pair's post-coital smoke break, a lab experiment on a monkey, among others. There are also anachronistic skits, the ones about King Karl XII (1682-1718), marching armies filtering in the background like a painting in motion, to an expedition against Russia, the young King even takes a fancy to a young boy (inviting him to stay in his tent), Andersson's humor is dry and perverse,when the King returns in the wake of the battlefield debacle, he can barely walk, his command of using the bathroom is met with another kick in the teeth.
However, Andersson's coup de maître in A PIGEON… is the blatantly horrific scene of a giant cylinder engraved with “Boliden” (the notorious Swedish mining and smelting company), rotating above fire with black slaves inside, followed by a bunch of long-in -the-tooth white people watching and sipping champagne, these two takes strike like a lacerating censure of the country's (and Europe at large) unregenerate attitude of its colonial past, simply jaw-dropping and totally indelible!
In ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, similar vignettes are concatenated with an omnipresent female voice offering succinct statements. Here, the tone is more contemplative, mournful, finality seems inevitable. Hitler awaits his doomsday in the bunker, a crucifixion with a man carrying a huge cross who asks "what have he done to deserve that", an aftermath of a homicide, an elderly couple's visiting the tomb of their decease son, a priest has lost his faith and then is refused by his psychiatrist because it is not his appointed time.
A compline accompanied by an aria, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS is Andersson's eulogy to life itself, its macrocosmic ambition aim to achieve something Malickian, to gaze human existence with a God's view, like the money shot of a man embracing a woman, staying afloat above a city in ruins, it is numinous, but set side by side with A PIGEON…, Andersson's poker-faced absurdity dissipates, most of the time, everyday occurrence is contrived with a veneer of banality and blandness that perhaps is closer to his more serene Weltanschauung now .
Anyway, Andersson's unique aesthetic, Nordic drabness mingled with a Wes Anderson-ish picturesqueness has been here to stay, with only 6 features under his belt, consecutive consumption is not recommended.
referential entries: Roy Andersson's A SWEDISH LOVE STORY (1970. 7.3/10); Dietrich Brüggemann's STATIONS OF THE CROSS (2014, 4.2/10).
English Title: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Original Title: En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron
Year: 2014
Country: Sweden, Germany, Norway, France, Denmark
Language: Swedish, English
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Director/Screenwriter: Roy Andersson
Music: Hani Jazzar, Gorm Sundberg
Cinematography: István Borbás, Gergely Pálos
Editing: Alexandra Strauss
Cast:
Nils Westblom
Holger Andersson
Jonas Gerholm
Roger Oslen Likvern
Viktor Gyllenberg
Ola Stensson
Lotti Törnros
Oscar Salomonsson
Rating: 7.9/10
English Title: About Endlessness
Original Title: Om det oändliga
Year: 2019
Country: Sweden, Germany, Norway, France
Language: Swedish
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Director/Screenwriter: Roy Andersson
Music: Henrik Skram
Cinematography: Gergely Pálos
Cast:
Martin Serner
Tatiana Delaunay
Bengt Bergius
Anja Broms
Thore Flygel
Lotta Forsberg
Stefan Karlsson
Göran Holm
Rating: 7.3/10
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