You, The Living

Posted by Loukas Tsouknidas (loukas@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 2, 2007

Roy Andersson raised so much talk with his previous film Songs from the Second Floor that everybody was anxious to get a ticket for his new feature at every festival it has screened so far. I decided to pay my dues to this idiosyncratic creator at the recent Athens IFF and I didn’t get disappointed. But not very enthusiastic either

There is no plot in this eccentric, gloomy view of modern day Sweden. Just a good number of short scenes that are loosely tied together by a general layer of misery. But in this pessimistic view of modern life there is place for humor, in a mild, surprising manner that doesn’t mock its victims, but rather makes them look more human that they have become in their lives.

Andersson almost never moves his camera, setting his shots artfully with a color pallette that couldn’t be more suitable to his subject. Pale and grey-ish, it sets the tone for the protagonists mood swings and feels at home with the supposedly depressive swedish weather.

In the end I just didn’t feel any deep relation to this film, the way I did with Aki Kaurismaki’s trilogy of the lonely man. I appreciated the laughs and I got the life-can-be-really-depressive context but I couldn’t stay focused through the whole movie without thinking it looked like an underachievement. Such cinematography and an eye for the human element in every seemingly unimportant aspect of everyday life is bound to go unnoticed in all this repetition and understatement.

Still it’’s good work although it won’t bring scandinavian cinema any new audience.

Grade: C+

Read more articles by Loukas Tsouknidas