 |
| Courtesy of Canal+ |
Like Terrence Malick, Roy Andersson stopped directing full
length features before making a grand return decades later, refreshed and
having mastered his newfound niche. His
return to the director’s chair came in the form of Songs from the Second
Floor, an abstract series of visually astonishing and increasingly absurd
and grotesque vignettes that form a tapestry that feels borne out of some
unholy union between Jacques Tati and Hieronymus Bosch.
Like Lech Majewski’s picturesque investigation into Pieter
Bruegel’s The Procession to Calvary with his stirring art project The
Mill and the Cross, Songs from the Second floor is all but
completely disinterested in characters or a formal plot. Instead the film is a darkly comic collection
of moving paintings with most everyone in the shot sitting still as the camera
remains in a fixed position with minutiae slowly presenting itself in the visual
composition. Movement is minimal and the
film is often bathed in depressing grays or blues, making the film’s color palette
somewhat overcast and near rainy.
Mixing everything from Tarkovsky to Bergman to Dreyer while
also evoking the surreal absurdities of Bunuel and Dali, Songs from the
Second Floor is an audiovisual smorgasbord that’s at once sterile and
messy, agnostic and devout, hilarious and horrific. At times the film randomly bursts into song
including a subway sequence where everyone starts singing at once. All of these extreme emotional reactions are
being stoked simultaneously by meticulously constructed sequences where all the
actors and set pieces are carefully arranged in key positions, seeking to
somehow evoke everything and nothing.
Loosely inspired by Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, the film is more of a surreal experience of being dropped in a netherworld
where human life seems to have lost all of its humanity. Songs from the
Second Floor is chock full of utterly astounding wide-angled vistas yet is
as colorless and bloodless as a doctor’s office, making this Tati-esque
tragicomic waking nightmare simultaneously opulent and oppressive.
Reportedly this labor of love project took
Andersson over four years to complete, shot by three different cinematographers,
and it shows with many of its impossible and improbable images seemingly
rendered in camera in real time and not in post-production. Music by Benny Andersson is minimal and
secondary with most of the film focused on the imagery. Whether you understand or enjoy the experience
of watching the film starts to grow secondary to your fascination with how so
many of these jaw dropping scenes were accomplished technically.
While sporting a sizable Swedish cast, Songs from the
Second Floor cares less about individual performances than having actors
stand in place in certain spots on the set while other figures move around in
the shot. The film paints a picture of a
world lived in by well dressed salarymen marching from one point to the next in
between evoking biblical imagery such as a salesman chucking his overstock of
life-sized crucifixes into a trash heap.
People become figures on a large cinematic canvas rather than portraying
individual characters. If a film
director has ever attempted to dramatize Hiernonymus Bosch’s The Garden of
Earthly Delights with all the good and bad (mostly bad) on display, Songs
from the Second Floor is undeniably it!
As close to being an unfettered expression of pure cinema as
Sweden has ever come, Songs from the Second Floor like Hard to Be a
God is somewhat akin to visiting another planet which looks like our own
but bears key differences that render it alien.
The first film in what soon became known as the first installment in a
trilogy of films followed by You, the Living in 2007 and A Pigeon Sat
on a Branch Reflecting on Existence in 2014, Songs from the Second Floor
is by no means easy breezy viewing.
Deliberately flighty and even meandering as we’re chauffeured
from vignette to vignette, some of which come together while others not, the
film achieves a rare feat of being enthralling and distancing, drawn closer into
a world determined to push us out of it.
Most certainly not for everyone but for the adventurous cinephile
searching for a new wholly unique cinematic voice, look no further than the
cinema of Roy Andersson, one of the most original cinematic voices in the world
today!
--Andrew Kotwicki
