You will learn few things about what cinema (and you) can be until you learn to train and practice your perception against the flux of images, and this means to be the still point from which everything else is viewed to be in motion, letting it be what it is as it makes its journey to reach you.This is comic, at first sight, tragic, about modern alienation, failure, ego, compromise, desperation. People die. Lose their pension fund. Lose love. All for no real reason that we see of so just the way life strikes us most days. A gloom because it's all faced dead-on, simply the pain without story-drama that justifies. The same as his previous film except a little lighter even, with actual songs this time.But if you are still long enough, then what? A woman sings in a funeral about a next world without grief, loss, want. But of course the funeral itself like every other vignette here is not filmed to sadden or crush. There is a distance here from which all this gloom is filmed which is the distance in which whatever real grief, loss, want, we would normally perceive in these lives (say, in a melodrama) evaporates as if absorbed by the dingy walls.The same woman repeats the song a little later but now casually in a bathtub, her husband is putting on a shirt in the background, a window looks out to bright day. There is a routine in what we do, yes. Elsewhere characters measure a carpet, rehearse their bass drum for parade, shake hands for a business meeting. They all look like they haven't had a good day in years, none of them a hero, all of it inglorious. But just what of all this we see isn't a world without grief, loss, want? Characters suffer, or seem to, but do we as we watch? The whole thing was like a breeze of air lifting human pettiness and desperation and showing them to be flimsy curtains that can flutter and let air and light through rather than just hang.Where you put in life to always have a lover or a pension fund? If any of these go, like the guitarist lover the girl searches for, they have been returned. Something lingers in the air, a beautiful dream here of a moving house. And when you are negligent of the 200 year old china that you smash trying to perform an impossible tablecloth trick because it was a boring dinner-party (a hilarious moment in the film), does anything prevent you, if it comes to that, from taking punishment with the same smile as part of only another absurd game?Some poignant satire, but even better, the mind that would fret and despair over suffering is not here, a stoic mind is.A marvelous image encapsulates this worldview, a brass band is rehearsing in an empty room, one of them is standing before huge windows playing his clarinet while outside a storm is heard booming and roaring. We are small, yes, and the outside is vast. But what prevents him from playing his music against the storm? If something does, he will stop then.

I've been wracking my brain to figure out a good comparison in popular media to Roy Andersson's dark comedy You, the Living or Du Levande (2007). The best parallel I can draw is to Tom Wilson's comic strip Ziggy. If you are familiar with the comic, it revolves around a rather mundane little man, Ziggy, who always winds up being the butt of his own jokes. Luckily, Wilson's comic only appears once a week and is four short newspaper frames at most. You, the Living sadly perseveres for an hour and a half.The film is made up of dozens of vignettes. Some are very brief glimpses while others last uncomfortably too long. Almost every scene is taken in a single shot with a wide angle, with the camera positioned in one spot. Occasionally there are slow zooms, or pans that shift so slowly that the viewer is unsure whether the camera is actually moving or if they are just becoming drowsy from staring so long at an unchanging scene. I have never seen anything filmed like this before, with so few shots and perspectives. Most filmmakers try to engage the audience with diverse composition; this felt more like I was watching a play because of the static angle. It also had a theatrical quality because of the set. I found the set to be very pleasing to the eye. It reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson's films because everything in it seemed very deliberate, like it was in exactly the right place. This contrasted with the subject matter; the majority of characters were disheveled and were going through existential crises. They seemed not to belong to the pristine world of this elaborately constructed set. Many of the vignettes began with a character breaking the fourth wall and addressing the viewer, "Last night I had a dream," and the set successfully created the dreamy quality that many of the characters described. Andersson used colors that were very bright, vibrant shades and vibrant, but they were all washed out shades and seemed to be watered down. The fact that this film took place in contemporary time in an urban setting (an imitation of Stockholm) but all of the scenery was designed also added to the dreamy quality in which you know that you are in a specific place but it is different for some reason than the way you know it in reality.Though it was aesthetically well put together, when it comes down to it, I think this is a film that you'll either love or hate. I happened to hate it. It had aspects of the absurd in which there were scenes that could certainly happen, but they never actually would because they are far out. All of the characters were caricatures whose actions were disgruntling. They found themselves in awkward situations which were laughable and pathetic. It was like Family Guy because it was so stupid that I felt bad laughing, though that is not the strongest comparison because that humor is slapstick, whereas Andersson makes you cringe and chuckle at other people's misery. Usually, what began as humorous lasted half a minute too long, leaving me as a viewer anticipating the next bizarre event, tapping feet hoping to escape the current misery. Andersson admits that he has an expressionist influence, which I saw come through in this piece. The film was not so much plot driven as theme driven. It never focused on one character for too long but would switch between characters whose lives vaguely intersected. If any take away from You, the Living it would be, "when something is bad, it can only get worse." In one of the early scenes, a man is practicing the tuba in his apartment. It cuts to the man in the apartment below, frustrated with the noise bleeding through the ceiling. He bangs a broom against the ceiling to signal the tuba player to stop, but his broom banging ends up knocking down his chandelier. This pretty much sums up the "heads you win, tails I lose" motif. You don't get to really learn any intricacies of the characters. Instead they are all seen as one dimensional and are defined by a certain type of action rather than as multi-faceted. There is no passion for any of them, and ultimately, you don't really care that they are in miserable predicaments because none of them have depth. This is ultimately a very bleak film and even if you find it more amusing than I did, it will likely still leave you disheartened.

Ah yes, Roy Andersson. That humble, down-to-earth guy, famous creator of oodles of award winning commercials with a Scandinavian sense of super dry dead-pan humor peppered with a touch of surrealism and the absurd. He's also undisputed champ of static shots and builder of pitch-perfect studio sets, a director who prefers vignettes over a consistent story to make a picture, and quite an essential (post-)modern film-maker. Located somewhere between Bergman, Fellini, Buñuel, some say even Monty Python, he draws from all of them in a way, and yet is entirely unique by doing his own thing - filming losers, life, people caught in the clutches of capitalism, haunted by guilt, with death, destruction and the dark cloud of the apocalypse always hanging over life, the universe and everything. "Songs from the Second Floor" (2000) marks part one of his still unfinished trilogy. "Songs" is bleak, depressing, revealing, thought-provoking with dark comedy mixed in it, and, naturally, a must-see."You, the Living" (2007) returns to the same world in a comedic way, sort of. "Sort of" because among other things there's of course that streetcar named "Lethe", the name of one of the rivers of death in ancient Greek myth, and people stream out into their lives from it, zombie-like blocking its path... Fitting to the river of forgetfulness a bartender regularly reminds us again and again: "Last drink!" Other people have little to remember, but dream their lives away, in romantic fashion far removed from reality, feel nightmarish bombers looming or embarrass themselves by trying to impress others, and get the death penalty before they wake up. At least they finally provided entertainment that way, as popcorn is handed out at the electric chair. Between dreams, hopes and impending doom life has to be lived, and it's full with its little quirks, pumped up by Andersson to the point of hilarious grotesqueness however presented realistically. Or the other way round. By marrying these apparent extremes without focusing on a central story in a painterly style we enter a state of mind that helps us to evaluate, appreciate and apprehend the fun way: you know, learn more about those guys addressed by the movie that are just mirrored on screen, supposedly known as "the living". Because we shouldn't be surprised that while we hold our heads high towards heaven our life as we know it will be extinguished at the end. That bombshell of a bummer would be the point when we - as the living - should have figured it all out, or at least have an inkling what all that Dixieland jazz is actually about...

It is not often that a film combines dream and reality or tragedy and comedy the way that Roy Anderson's film Du Levande, You, the Living, does (Sweden, 2007). The simple title of this film simultaneously calls out to viewers and states the film's subject, "You, the Living." This film is a portrayal of the living, of the dirty, gritty, comically painful parts of life that the living experience. The film is composed of fifty vignettes portraying different aspects of life for different characters all set to the soundtrack of Dixieland jazz music partly adapted from music by ABBA's Benny Andersson. The film has many characters but the starring roles go to Elisabet Helander, Björn Englund, and Jessika Lundberg.To give even a very brief plot summary of this film is a nearly impossible task. To fully understand the plot of this film, explanations of each vignette are necessary. The film has many story lines that rarely intersect, and these intersections are insignificant at best. There is little character development, and only one character's name is mentioned enough to commit to memory. Essentially, each vignette is a portrayal of an ordinary life occurrence that is a little bit quirkier than normal in an attempt to elicit amusement from the audience. To summarize some of the stories, there is a couple whose fights cause them to get into trouble at their work, a groupie hopelessly in love with a guitarists and dreams of their marriage, a self absorbed woman who feels as if nobody understands her and is frustrated when she receives attention from the wrong man, a carpenter who daydreams that he is put to death for breaking china, and the leader of the film's music, a man who plays the sousaphone at funerals. Clearly, the stories do not make for a coherent synopsis.This film is billed as a comedy and in some senses, I would agree with this. However, for me, it was the kind of amusement that I get from hearing about humorous daily trials from my friends and not the kind of comedy that I usually enjoy, comedy that is seated deeply in relationships between developed characters and circumstances beyond the ordinary. And while many of the circumstances seemed beyond the ordinary, such as the man who dreamt that he was given the electric chair for breaking a two hundred year old china set, the ordinary, lighthearted humor seeps its way into every scene, manifested in this specific scene as the electric chair operator reading the manual to figure out how the chair works. The circumstances vary in their commonality, but the thread of humor based in reality is is woven through each vignette.With depicting various life situations that are somewhat standard for the people involved, the out of place Dixieland music in the background made the film interesting, and tied the scenes together. From the first scene to the last, this lighthearted and carefree music colored the mundane backdrop of this film. Another interesting technique that added depth to the film was the choice of filter, which had an unrealistic and dreamlike quality to it, making a shot of an apartment seem more tenuous, more ethereal, less ordinary.Personally, the humor of this film is not something I particularly enjoy but I did appreciate it for many reasons. Like I said before, this film has the incredible ability to combine the difficult messy details of reality with dreamy hopes and fears creating a film that is both amusing and saddening. Something I enjoyed about the film was that I could relate to it. I, along with all "the living," can connect with the funny mundane moments in the film where one can only respond with the phrase "such is life" and the frustrating and troubling places we can get stuck in as a result of these circumstances. The duality of the film, the fine line between reality and dream that this film dances on, is what garners it so much critical acclaim. While I may not appreciate its content, I know this film is artistically skilled and can understand how it has won awards in both the United States and the Nordic Countries, among other places.The director of this film has said that it took three years to get all of the shots together the way he envisioned them. I think that fact speaks to the film as a whole. The complexity that was creating these sets of "ordinary" life mirrors the complexity that is "ordinary" life, in line with what I see as the film's purpose: to depict the difficult intricacy of life, in all its humorous glory.