I wonder if I enjoyed this film in spite of itself? The message seems bleak even by Nordic standards. Love is repeatedly unrequited, people feel sorry for themselves directly as in the woman who launches the film, or indirectly like the woman visiting her grandmother in the nursing home.Dreams taunt or haunt the dreamers. Dreams do seem to merit the longer scenes in this panorama parade. The guy stuck in life/traffic recounting his death by dinner party dream, young Anna and her rock and roll fantasy. Granted the apartment on wheels was nicely done, showing how she wants to move on...and gradually drawing your attention to the window, where eventually adoring strangers throng.Music might be the most beautiful thing that men or women can create in this film, often at the displeasure of their spouses or neighbors. Nature, or specifically the weather, garners more respect than anything else. The powerful declarations when the thunder spoke, and then towards the end, the sort of beatific visions of people looking away from not just their friends and family, but from themselves to the clouds in the sky.Or is it to the planes. And are they bombers? Poking fun at bureaucracy worked well. Something about the barber scene was very enjoyable. The psychiatrist's confession also resonated with my more abject attitudes. The scene in the rich man's restaurant is likely to be a fan favorite.There's probably more going on than I pulled out of viewing this over a couple of nights between my own (pathetic) living. Stark and spare walls in all scenes make things seem even emptier than they are. But when Don Quixote appears on a wall, and bus is headed to/from Lethe, these are surely more than mere signs.Not sure, but I wonder if in America if Coen Brothers' fans might like the sort of treatment of the less than photogenic people going about their small lives. Plenty of drab and flab on dismal display.Is this a film for We, the Dead to laugh at You, The Living? Or just a mirror...

"You the Living" is quite unlike other movies. It is more like a series of quasi-comic sketches, or perhaps even a series of photographs of animated paintings. It opens with a man sleeping, for what seems an eternity. You must relax into the slow pace, that proceeds much the way real life does with long periods of the same thing happening, with what's interesting confined to a tiny dot of the screen, like watching a plane wreck from great distance. It is set in a very bleak, rainy, cold foggy Norway where interiors are painted shades of hospital green, and lit with cold fluorescent light. The actors are nearly all overweight or over 65. Only a tiny handful of the enormous cast could be considered photogenic. Nearly everyone is unreasonably grumpy and seriously depressed. The theme is selfishness results in ordinary cruelties. People create their own misery with their self-absorption. You have to stand back and see the humour or you too could be smothered in the gloom.

"I had a dream last night..." This repeated line sets the tone and much of the plot for Roy Andersson's film You, the Living. You, the Living is a film that gives the viewer a few scenes of a number of people's lives and gives them the opportunity to see what the characters had dreamed the night before. These characters live very mundane and repetitive lives and the movie goer is given an opportunity to see into their more fantastical imaginings about what their life could be like. This non-linear story progresses through a series of glimpses into the everyday lives of a number of characters – some who turn out to be connected to each other and others who do not. The repetition of the music of the 'New Orleans' jazz band and the phrase "I had a dream last night" are the strongest connections that the viewer can make to understand the story. Roy Andersson seems to be taking a study of the everyday realities of human life and the mundane repetition that compromises so much of it. Andersson is able to manipulate these realities by looking into the dreaming minds of his characters, and showing what their dreams from the previous night actually looked like – playing them out as if they were a part of reality. The audience gets to see everything from a man put to death for breaking antique china – to a young woman marrying a rock star and the awesome times they have together. These dreams are completely absurd but played out as if they were completely realistic. Overall it is an interesting story that attempts to look at reality and absurdity together.I think that the different dreams that Andersson (and the writers) have chosen for their characters to have and for the audience to see are very interesting and completely opposite of each other in every way. On the one hand we have the dream of broken china and the death penalty. If I were a psychologist I'm sure that I could have a field day with all the dreams in this movie, but the first one seems to have the most blatant symbolism of fear about public performance and a fear of death. I adore how this man is overwhelmed by this feeling that he must be the entertainment at a sad dinner wake and the way that his dream plays out. Andersson is brilliant in the extremely careful setup as he exams the different pieces of china and the different sides of the table cloth – only to have all his worst fears come true when the china comes flying off with the table cloth. We then move on to the masterfully absurd court scene in which this poor, scared out of his wits gentleman is sentenced to death for his awful crime of destroying antique china.Andersson uses absurdism to point out a lot of the more quirky aspects of our everyday lives that we may just not be paying attention to. He contrasts the daily call for last drinks at the local bar with a young woman's dream of her life as it would be married to a rock star. By using so many extremes in the film Andersson is able to get at the quintessential idea that life can be mundane and repetitious if we allow it to be, but if we dream big dreams and try to pursue bigger things, our lives can be more than just the daily grind we live through every day.While I found this film difficult to follow at times, and slightly confusing in the formatting – with periods of very little dialogue and seemingly unconnected actions, in a close viewing I really enjoyed the overall message of the film. I found the filming style of Andersson to be very interesting and it is clear that he is a real masterful filmmaker. He was able to connect a group of seemingly unconnected scenes in an interesting and entertaining way. I think that this is the type of film that only gets more compelling and interesting as you view it multiple times. As you continue to understand the connections of the characters and how their dreams fit into the realities that they live you are able to see how compelling the story of everyday life can be especially when you look at the dreams that go with it. Overall I recommend this film if you are willing to dedicate yourself to the multiple viewings it takes to truly appreciate it.

This film is troll more than droll. We pass from droll Tati to revisiting troll Ibsen in the seams. Keaton deadpan to elaborate, but ultimately inhuman Tati, we have at last a film where humanity is revisited in a tender, political absurdity."Tomorrow is another day" is shorthand for a jazzy appreciation for what comes obliquely, voiding the gone with the wind theme the film evokes. Boozy, absinthe, ashen backgrounds are so evocative in the film, that, apart from partaking in the trollishness, demonstrate the tender absurdity, and the ultimate logic of the two dreams that are some kind of axis in the film.First, we have a worker (as the cement machine exemplifies) narrating to us the viewers his dream of being sent to electrocution after playing the tablecloth game during a dinner, that is pulling the tablecloth under some important china. But look what appears: some swastika marquetry on the table; this is a sublime instance of shorthand for political and historical commentary, not pushing and not pulling.The other dream has a marriage on a locomotive - what a dear example of Freudian phallic thrust as always a train in a film exemplifies - only now married to a guitar and a celebration from the onlookers to the public.What these two instances offer is a re-visitation of the Brechtian effrontery towards the public with trollishness, regret, beauty, class conscience in a watermarked but oh so potent tone, all in the direct but under-marked theme of dream which can bring melancholy and a pervasive sense of reality when back to awakeness.Awakeness? The film has this deadpan particularity as if commenting among other things on the poker-faced practicality if not malfunctioning of our lives. It takes Brecht who asks the public with class and narrative punch and turns it into singsong exposing the undercurrent underdog rhythm of ashen vistas or unexplained vast perspective in nutshell interiors with Judy and Punch panache. The surroundings are inhumane in their more-than-personified manner, so when the aircrafts occur we feel what was exposed in the beginning: someone licks our hasty heels in and out of this world, in bouncy, aligned, unexplained and ordained awaking as the first shot with the Don Quixote (Daumier) print exemplifies. The urban locomotive bounces unseen. Thank you.