You, the Living

I really didn't see this one coming. Roy Andersson had me pegged out, I am the perfect sucker for a static camera (long live King Borowczyk!) and I was laughing hysterically for the first fifteen minutes of the film, he hit me straight between the eyes. You have to be a brilliant man to make self-pity hilarious. Andersson reminds me of the third mate on the Pequod in Moby Dick, Flask, a man who took the whole of life to be a practical joke that the good lord Himself is playing on us. And the web of egotism in this movie is truly hilarious.

The level of satire is at fever pitch, you have one deluded self-pitying dreamer harp on about the cruelty of the world and then totally ignore a spiritual self-reflection crying out in agony. The very depths of egotism are plumbed. I really never thought it possible to go further than Bergman's "The Silence" in this respect. However the grotesqueness of the self-love and self-regard, by every single character in this film, is staggering. We are shown an existence where the talentless and the idle rail against a world they believe has been unjust towards them, they truly are legends in their own living rooms. The human beings in this film make self-deception and self-delusion a great artform!

Only one woman in the film appears to have any sort of understanding of what is going on. An old woman who refuses to leave a chapel, knelt down praying for the forgiveness of all mankind, her speech is the most electrifying condemnation of the modern world I have ever heard. She reveals through her prayers that what is wrong with the world is not to be fixed by mere tinkering, there are not a just a few faults, there is an abyss of corruption that can only be mended by immolation, and judgement day. Watching this movie puts me in the mind of a naked monk, stood waist deep in a cold river at midnight screaming out a thousand Kyrie eleisons for the sins of humanity. Another grand jape is that it is clear that her prayers are futile, and in fact she is stopping everyone going home at closing time.

This is not a film for the smug, no-one is spared, no idols are left on the altar, no one group of humans is harangued to the glory of another group. Never has there been a greater more transcendent more astonishingly beautiful summation of our sins. It is a film for the end of the world, it is the grand jest, the great hideous practical joke of human life!

From the catalogue of images it is too difficult to pick a favourite, I slapped my thigh and almost fell off my chair in the cinema, screaming with laughter as a man attempted to pull the tablecloth from under a set service. I won't spoil what happens, but the suspense builds up, and something truly unexpected occurs. It is probably the funniest thing I have ever seen in a cinema. I am quite reserved and I just couldn't control myself: that is the measure of the greatness of this film.

The shooting of "You, the Living" is impeccably formalist. We are shown the palette of an artist, dingy browns, yellows, greys, and sky blues set alive by the shock of luminous brass textures. There is never a tone out of place, it's like an hour and a half of symphonic Whistlerian colour-meld. The obsession that must have gone into putting that colour scheme in place is extraordinary. And no shot is wasted, as with all great movies, there is not a spare inch of celluloid.

Perhaps the best film I've ever seen.

You can't really call Roy Andersson prolific, (6 films in 37 years). Nor can you accuse him of being conventional; he doesn't do 'straight-forward', at least when it comes to narrative. "You, the Living", his first film in seven years, is like a surreal documentary in which a large number of characters are observed doing nothing very much and if that sounds off-putting, let me assure you it isn't. This is a funny, accessible and surprisingly warm-hearted movie, a slice-of-life far removed from that which we normally see on the screen.

Of course, 'slice-of-life' is hardly the proper moniker to apply to this movie since most people's lives are unlikely to be anything like this. The incidents on the screen run the gamut from the almost terrifyingly ordinary to the downright wacky and while characters may flit by, sometimes never to be seen again, others to reappear as if anxious for approval, Andersson bestows on them all a kind of benign affection. That, and some rollicking music, ensure the time we spend with them is time well-spent.

There is no plot. There are no central characters. There are no moving cameras or close-ups. In fact, this film does not follow any of the conventional storytelling techniques used by mainstream film. However, Roy Andersson's Du Levande is a remarkable piece of cinematic storytelling. It is a touching look at the human psyche.

Comprised of a series of vignettes, Roy Andersson gives us an intimate insight into what makes us all human. In perfectly framed static shots, added with the perfectly in tune, yet quirky, music, Roy introduces us to a host of characters as they undertake their daily existence. Some bordering on tragic, others hilarious, we are taken on a Nordic journey like no other.

It is a journey into the little things that make us human. Instead of over-the-top storytelling or visual techniques, everything is stripped down to the bare minimum so that our sole focus is on the characters themselves. It focuses on the insignificant points of our lives that make us who we are; our dreams, our desperation. It's through this simple observation of others that we can accept who we are as individuals.

The washed out colours and deathly-pale makeup of the characters only seems to emphasize their individual stories and remind us that unlike them, we are all alive. There is no happy ending or light at the end of the tunnel in this film, yet you walk out of the cinema with a sense of life. Much more accessible than his earlier film, Songs from the Second Floor, Du Levande, is a truly inspiring piece of cinema.

I laughed out loud several times during this film though give it a cursory glance and you would think it was something else altogether. I adore the pace and the way it slowly burns into you as you are presented these gobsmackingly beautiful tableaux. Andersson gives us something else here. Shows us something I had not seen since his last film. He is compositionally exceptional and via his method of fixing the camera and allowing action to take place before us, he opens the door on humanity and we peer into a place that reflects our own lives, our little lives. It is powerful stuff. It is the simplicity with which he allows the events to take place that creates the opposite feeling of complexity. Everything in front of the camera is anything but simple. Andersson's attention to detail is extraordinary. I believe most scenes, if not all, are sets built from scratch according to his designs. I cannot recommend this film highly enough. For me it took me to a place and I came out of it having witnessed a world frayed and beautiful, starched and pained, barren and splendid. At once alien and familiar. This film is brilliant and life affirming. I know because I came out smiling feeling wonderful. It has taken him seven years to make this. If he only made this one film he would still be up there with the greats.

The large bell in a bar intermittently rings for last orders and the inevitable rush to queue forms at the counter – do we want what we need only when it's too late? Or is the irony of the opening scene's wailing Cassandra a more resonant reflection of our perceptions on individual existence? There's an endless fascination about where writer-director Roy Andersson wants to take us in his fourth feature, "You, The Living". With fifty or so semi-related vignettes strung together by a penchant for tragicomic hyper-reality, its wistful interpretations and symbolic instances of life that bind us all in this great big cosmic Sisyphean struggle. The sheer simplicity of these vignettes act to dramatise the tenuity and immense preciousness of being apart of the symbiotic relationships we have with one another. Andersson might whittle down the complexity of the human condition through harsh and fast cynicism more than he should, but he also reminds us of the inherent, reassuring glory of waking up each morning to a new tomorrow when we're all aware of our own distinct forms of arrested development.