You, the Living

Another title on a few best-of lists of 2009 was the Swedish film You, the Living, from writer-director Roy Andersson. It is an exceedingly droll comedy of many characters and storylines depicting the mundane lives of ordinary citizens. I'm no expert on the Scandinavian sense of humor, but I would guess that long winters and short daylight hours may contribute to this style, a sort of shrug of the shoulders toward the absurdities of life.

The film is impossible to summarize, since some of the scenes are just a few seconds long. In parts it is reminiscent of Monty Python, particularly one of the longer segments, which has a man recounting his dream: he tries to do the "tablecloth" trick at a family party, breaks valuable china, and ends up getting sentenced to the electric chair. In another, a customer at a barbershop insults his Arabic barber, who butchers his hair. Others are much more subtle, such as a professor being interrupted at some gala for a phone call from his son, who is asking him for money.

There are a few characters who resurface throughout: a morose woman who constantly says no one understands her, though her boyfriend (a biker), repeatedly says he does, a Dixieland brass band (perhaps in a nod to Woody Allen) and a young woman wearing pink boots who pines after a rock musician (the lead singer of the "Black Devils"). She dreams of marrying him, and in the film's most poignant shot, perhaps an homage to Fellini in I Vitteloni, their apartment immediately after the wedding glides past the countryside like a train car, with crowds forming outside to congratulate them.

Andersson's camera style is so simple as to be primitive--he props the camera in corner and lets it roll, with long takes and no closeups. The actors are almost without exception unexceptional in looks, which gives the impression that he pulled people off the street. There is an epigram of a quotation by Goethe, which gives the film a literary gloss, but I found it to be a sporadically amusing but occasionally tedious exercise, which benefits from a slight running time.