Apparently a big success at Cannes, this would have to be my recipient of the “I don’t get it” award. Basically, the film is a series of absurd or quirky vignettes with a bunch of characters going about their ordinary lives, with certain characters recurring and others not, with certain characters connected to others, but no overarching storyline. Example: a crying teacher flees her classroom. When her very young students ask why, she explains that her husband called her a hag. We then hear his side of the story, but she never shows up again. Although the film is essentially a comedy, writer-director Roy Andersson has given it the look and feel of what I would imagine to be a Soviet propaganda film—static long shots, drab locations, (mostly) plain-looking actors, and no score. I kept thinking the film took place in Eastern Europe, but it was actually filmed in Stockholm. A few of the vignettes are characters describing dreams or fantasies, and in these, occasionally, something interesting or funny happens. I laughed briefly at a dream sequence in which a chubby woman in a helmet straddles her her lover ecstatically even as he tells her about having lost money in an investment. Unfortunately, it goes on for a couple of minutes. I would really like to be able to explain the appeal of the movie, which I guess attempts to be a painterly portrait of the universal desire to connect with other human beings, but, you know, I kept checking my watch when I was watching it.
IMDB link
viewed 4/13/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival
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