Synopsis:
In this surreal Swedish film from director Roy Andersson, a toxic green light colors each scene, setting the story in a bleak post modern world. The economy is failing, as is the stability of the...
In this surreal Swedish film from director Roy Andersson, a toxic green light colors each scene, setting the story in a bleak post modern world. The economy is failing, as is the stability of the human psyche, and even as the story relies heavily on order and structure, rooting itself in organized settings--the train station, the board room table, the hospital, the business conference--the action and dialogue strays into a nonsensical, backwards, impossible place. Darkly comic and relentlessly bizarre, SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR is like a Fellini film in slow motion, or a David Lynch film drained of color, or an abstract Monty Python comedy. Structured around the ominous statement "Beloved is the one who sits down" by the poet Cesar Vallejo, the movie is organized into vaguely related vignettes, all occurring in adjacent locations at almost the same point in time, and occasionally overlapping. The characters in Andersson's film wear business suits. They are sickly pale, and very puffy and unhealthy looking. They wander aimlessly but with instinctive purpose, perpetually suffering bad luck, and following daily routines that often end in gruesome injury, drunkenness, death, or just plain weirdness. A badly burned man who has just set his office building on fire rides the subway expressionless, while all the other passengers sing opera loudly and in unison. A failed crucifix salesman angrily unloads a truck full of Jesuses at the dump, flinging the crosses into a giant ghastly pile. A young girl is selected by a group of executives to be sacrificed, and at a ceremony attended by clergymen, businessmen, and hundreds of other officials, she is pushed off a cliff. This artistic, visually engrossing, and conceptually awe-inspiring film competed at Cannes in 2001.
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