Pick of the Day: "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence"
On MUBI and for rent: The existential Nordic vaudeville of Roy Andersson
Have you ever seen a Roy Andersson movie? You’d know if you had; the Swedish writer-director makes films slowly — only four in the last 22 years — but with painstaking cosmic absurdism. He works in the same wing of the Museum of Cinema that houses David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Peter Greenaway, and other artist-extremists — except Andersson’s exhibition hall is Old World, exhausted, and covered with a fine patina of surrealist dust.
MUBI, the subscription VOD platform dedicated to independent and international movies, is offering up 2014’s "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) as their Film of the Day — it will continue to be available on the service for a while - and it’s also available as an inexpensive rental on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere.
Like Greenaway, Andersson creates baroque visual tableaux, landscapes in which his anonymous characters — lost souls on their way from Beckett to the bardo — try to make sense of an insensate universe. From my June 11, 2015 Boston Globe review of the film:
A flamenco lesson stalls when the instructor (Lotti Tornros) starts feeling up her favorite student (Oscar Salomonsson). A portly gentleman (Jonas Gerholm) arrives for a restaurant meeting on the wrong day at the wrong time and maybe in the wrong place. ('“Could you possibly confirm that I’m the one who made the mistake?” he asks timidly.) A barber confesses he’s a non-pro standing in for the real barber, who’s sick; behind his back, a customer tiptoes quietly away.
Andersson likes to puckishly fold time back in on itself, either within the frame or through editing. A greasy-spoon diner perched at the edge of an industrial wasteland is suddenly invaded by the troops of the 18th century Swedish King Charles XII, streaming across the background of the shot on their way to the Battle of Poltava; Charles himself (Viktor Gyllenberg) takes a liking to the busboy. Another sequence in a modern-day beer hall flashes back to 1943 and a joyously gloomy musical number involving a proprietress named Limping Lotte and a chorus of sailors.
Weird, sure, but also visually arresting and charged with a deep, sad sense of humor about the human tragicomedy and the cruelties we both suffer and — in a pair of scenes that bolt the movie to the ground — visit upon each other. A little Roy Andersson goes a long way, but if you can get on his wavelength, his other films are equally rewarding: “Songs From the Second Floor” (2000), “You, The Living” (2007), and last year’s magisterial “About Endlessness.”
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