"You, the Living" (2007)

In that symbolic year of 2000, at the turn of the present century, Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor was released. Andersson, virtually unknown to the rest of the world outside of Europe, had earlier enjoyed high praise for his first feature-length, A Swedish Love Story (1970); but his second film, Giliap (1975), flopped badly and lost a considerable amount of money for its producers. Andersson was forced to retreat to making television commercials to sustain himself, a stint that lasted nearly 25 years. During that period, Andersson directed hundreds and hundreds of commercials, an endeavor that resulted in his being named the greatest commercial director of his time; the commercial period served as a kind of apprenticeship for the director, since he learned to craft ingenious 30 second narratives by limiting visual data to the utterly necessary, a technique that he adapted for use in Songs from the Second Floor. The success of that film owes much to the years of practice Andersson undertook in budgeting and producing commercials for those companies that insisted upon visual (and cost-effective) efficiency.


Nevertheless, Songs from the Second Floor took four years to make. His latest film, You, the Living, released exactly seven years after Songs..., took three years to shoot. Precision was wed to contemplation. The latter film's title is taken from a line of Goethe's, in the Roman Elegies:

Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed,
Lest Lethe's ice-cold wave lick your escaping foot.

You, the Living premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and reportedly received a 10-minute standing ovation at its conclusion. Roy Andersson released a statement to the Cannes public, describing the content of the film (which I am compelled to reproduce entirely below):

There is a proverb in a collection of old Icelandic poetry called 'The Poetic Edda' that says: 'Man is man's delight.' I like this idea that man is not alone on earth, but is dependent on others.

Nevertheless, if man is the joy of others, he is also the source of his problems and pain - this is as true for important moments in history as it is for the little moments of everyday life. Man fascinates man: that is how I interpreted this concise piece of thousand-year-old wisdom and adopted it as a device for the film.

My film is composed of a series of tableaux that illustrate the human condition. The characters represent different facets of human existence. They face problems, large and small, that range from issues of day-to-day survival to the big philosophical questions. I hope that You, the Living will give audiences the impression of watching moments of their own existence.

My study of man's fascination with man sheds light on the underlying philosophy of the film. Contemporary cinema often ignores these values and favors storytelling that is in line with conventional dramaturgy. The intention is not to condemn this type of cinema, but instead to develop a cinematic language that is less predictable. My film breaks with classic narrative structure to tell its story via a mosaic of human destinies.

The tableaux show the misunderstandings and mistakes made by people who meet but don't really, because they feel so pressed for time, in their pursuit of what seems important to them. The film is about people's lives, their work, how they behave in society, their thoughts, worries, dreams, sorrows, joys, and unquenchable thirst for acknowledgment and love. These phenomena, what they're made of as much as their appearance and motivation, have as many variations as there are people on earth. And this is why 'man is man's delight.'

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To speak of You, the Living, thus forces one to make mention of Songs from the Second Floor. Both films are directed according to Andersson's idiosyncratic choice to have little to no camera movement or scene editing; we are treated to still-frame tableaux so geometrically precise that only a few seconds are necessary to comprehend the narrative mechanics of the scene. Both films are showered in monochromatic light, a device that allows the characters no shadows to escape into from the grimness of their reality; rather, in Andersson's own words, his characters are exposed in a "light without mercy." As the director makes clear above, the film has hardly any concern with "dramaturgy," and so it elliptically makes connections between the characters: there are no heroes or villains, there is no plot nor any conventional sense of story structure. What Andersson focuses on are the stray moments of life in which sudden, barely perceptible illuminations are made on the nature of modern existence, and the overwhelming need to combat the gross ennui that stifles the spirit of our age. When we see a man asleep on a couch under the framed picture of Don Quixote and his squire -- a bright generous day playing outside the window of his gray-lit office, in which no foreseeable purpose or urgency announces itself -- we are in a way asked to consider the comparatively minuscule amount of time that has passed from the time of Cervantes to our drab life now. What improvements in our feckless idealism have we made, and what ramparts have we still not surpassed, from the sterility of our day-to-day existence to the humble, ingenuous life of a dreamer? Man continues to be man's delight; but he is fast asleep, and living a life other than his own, in films, in pictures, in books. Man is an other, yes, but this 'Other' is very likely a film-goer, the kind of person who doesn't wake up unless he or she sees it on a screen, away from the trivial continuities that wind up or jam the cogs and wheels of one's private life.
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You, the Living begins with a prologue spoken by a visibly miserable woman sitting on a park bench and venting her spleen on the audience and on her unfortunate but empathetic boyfriend who attempts to cheer her up. The woman demands that she be left alone with her woes, and as the boyfriend and their dog 'Bobo' leave, she sings us a musically upbeat, yet ironically downcast song, a kind of vaudeville lament describing her woes and her desire for a motorcycle to take her away from the imagined miseries she undergoes in her too quiet or too boring swedish life. A plump man wearing a trench coat and glasses, of no apparent relation to her, suddenly steps out from behind a tree directly in back of the woman, and as he listens to her sing her song, he gently answers her interrogative lyric, "Is it strange to pray?" with a barely audible, "No, it's ok [to pray]." That she doesn't hear him -- or if she does, doesn't acknowledge that he may be right -- addresses one of Andersson's popular themes: people in general are all the more glad to be miserable -- or interminably busy -- than to be happy. Yet with his punctual sense of irony, Andersson drapes the contextual existence of his characters with evidence that the sum of life may be more than what they see. Around his characters, surrounding them as they sink into their folly and discontent, is the ever-present music of life, the omnipresent Everlasting Yea that responds to the call of one's stubborn and self-referential Everlasting No. A chorus of staring mechanical people, or a gaggle of happy-go-lucky musicians who play even when it rains, is to be found in Andersson's tableaux, a mixture of sonorous affirmations enclosing the shells of meek and irritable characters seeking life's featureless impossibilities, if only to prove their doubts right.
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We see that no one -- except, of course, us, the living -- witnesses the unspoken misery of a dog as it is dragged across the pavement by a thoroughly insensible codger, a miniature trial that may yet prove more insufferable than the bland and futile complaints of those who allow their dyspepsia to furnish them the tools for their idle bereavement. At a funeral, a jazz drummer gets a little too inspired and starts to riff a little too joyously for the taste of the otherwise saturnine process; he is summarily checked by the attendant priest, and the music resumes its melancholy. Wherever there is someone glad, a dozen unhappy souls loom forth and shut the curtains, crying out for attention.
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Indeed, the two films, Songs from the Second Floor, and You, the Living, are interchangeable, twin elements of the same spiritual dilemma; a dilemma essentially of humor. Our good humor has been tarnished by our too frequent willingness to spite the sunshine in favor of the rain, when the sunshine aggravates our wounded pride; to close our ears to the music that descends from the second floor, when we aren't the ones partying. I may even venture to propose that Andersson intends to confuse us with the titles of the two films: in the first scenes of You, the Living, we watch a man gleefully play his enormous tuba, in spite of the screams of his wife for silence, and the angry clamor of his neighbor who lives in the apartment directly beneath, who irascibly knocks at the ceiling with the broom handle; watching all this commotion is a solitary man staring out from his balcony in an apartment across. Hence the title, Songs from the Second Floor. In the film of the same name, one of the subjects -- or at least what can be construed from the tableaux -- revolves around the notion of the dead returning to life, who seek to be remembered by those, the living, who have forgotten through their own misplaced selfishness and angst what worse burdens the dead undergo to return to life, to wish again to live the life that we, the living, so foolishly take for granted. It is a zombie film of conviction.

The denouement of You, the Living characterizes the sudden emotion we feel when absolute extinction nakedly presents itself: the living no longer brag of their woes; they begin to hug their children closer rather than chide them, and they wish dearly that death were not so near as a nightmare of the electric chair could be in our sleep. Instead of the dreariness of rain, Andersson salutes our collective life with the enduring gift of music, the sole optimism that can bring daylight to the windows, and people's faces to wonder:
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