IdleRich
IdleRich
Anyone seen this? A few years back I really enjoyed the last film from the same guy called Songs From The Second Floor. A film unlike any I've ever seen really (although I've heard people compare it to The Phantom of Liberty), I watched it very late at night, probably tired and drunk but the endless succession of seemingly unrelated scenes with a totally still camera (actually it moves in one scene with an effect as surprising as a match being suddenly struck in a pitch-black room after all that stillness) has stayed with me ever since although I wouldn't claim that I understood much of what was going on. I'm hoping for more of the same in the new one anyway and reviews I've seen seem to be good so I'm quite excited. Reckon I'll try and check it out on the weekend.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,2269270,00.html
"Philip French
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer
You, the Living (94 mins, 15) Directed by Roy Andersson; starring Jessika Lundberg, Elisabeth Helander, Bjorn Englund, Leif Larsson
You, the Living, the masterly fourth movie by writer-director Roy Andersson, a 64-year-old Swede based in Gothenburg where he produces innovative TV commercials in his own studio.
Andersson has only made four films in 37 years. The one, Songs From the Second Floor, which shared the jury prize at Cannes in 2000, came after a gap of a quarter of a century. So the seven years that has passed between that and You, the Living is a mere breath in time.
Both pictures are shot in tableaux format in deep-focus long takes in washed-out pastel colours. The camera moves only once in the first film and just twice in the second. Both movies are tragicomedies. If they belong in an artistic tradition, it would be Surrealism or the theatre of the absurd and their particular affinities are with Buñuel and Ionesco.
Songs From the Second Floor was largely political: its targets the church, the capitalist system, fascism and a world running out of control. You, the Living is about everyday life, death and the human condition, 'about the vulnerability of human beings', as Andersson puts it. The title is a quotation from Goethe: 'Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.'
The film begins in a bare room with a man sleeping on a couch beneath a black-and-white reproduction of Picasso's Don Quixote. He wakes up saying he's had a dream that bombers are coming. In the 50th and final tableau, an armada of warplanes fills the sky over a neat little European town. In one shot, a tram announcing its destination as Lethe arrives at a misty terminus and its passengers disembark.
Every little scene (average length 90 seconds) makes a small point and moves on, some characters turning up in later shots, some not. Most of the time, there is conflict, open or concealed, as between a Muslim barber and a xenophobic customer.
A builder leans out of his van in a traffic jam to tell us about a terrible nightmare in which he pulls the tablecloth from a long table laid with a 200-year-old dinner service belonging to rich clients. Everything is smashed,he's put on trial before beer-swilling judges and sent to the electric chair. A sad girl keeps appearing in search of her lover, a rock guitarist, and imagines they've got married and that the bridal suite is moving like a train across the landscape and is met at a station by cheering crowds. Two other recurrent figures are a fat, tattooed biker and his embittered lover, an overweight slag with musical ambitions, who bicker about their dog. Meanwhile, individual members of a brass band rehearse to the annoyance of family and neighbours, but eventually gather to perform happily together. From time to time, Andersson returns to an austere, anonymous, overlit bar, an emblematic place where people sit staring into their glasses and only aroused when the bartender calls out for last orders. This is a funny, sad, cruel film, both crystalline and puzzling, hypnotic in its intensity.
These brief snatches from the lives of others are like a version of Hitchcock's Rear Window for which Samuel Beckett has been brought in to do a final rewrite."
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,2269270,00.html