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LXIX: Du Levande (You, The Living, Roy Andersson, 2007)
Unsummarizable Swedish near-masterpiece – certainly plot wise. It’s sort of Bergman with a (audience provided) laugh track. Ingmar Bergman and the Holy Grail, or Bergman’s tv sketch show, as it’s a series of vignettes. In an early sequence a depressed woman tells her companion to leave with her dog, and that it would have been better if she had not be born – but she might be persuaded to pop round later for a veal roast. (Then she sings a song - interrupted by a man in a rain coat). A driver tells us his dream of doing the old tablecloth under the crockery and cutlery trick, which results in the death sentence, and then we see it... A young woman tells a gothy-guitarist he plays good guitar and dreams she has married him. Their house appears to be a train, or anyway to run on rails. A racist demands a haircut, and the barber takes revenge by shaving a stripe across his scalp. His head fullen shaven, the racist goes to an important business meeting where the chair has a heart attack. Then there are the various members of the brass band – well, you need to be there, really.
It all builds to a doom laden climax.
It’s shot in grey and white, there is colour, but mostly lost in the fog - grey and olive - and it is definitely Scandinavian. Keep an eye on the edges of the screen and the background. Curious.
The title comes from Goethe: "Therefore rejoice, oh thou living one, blest in they lovelighted homestead, ere the dark Lethe’s sad wave wetteth they fugitive foot". Lethe is a destination of a tram in the film (or maybe a dream in the film)
Totals: 62 (Cinema: 22; DVD: 38; TV: 2)
Unsummarizable Swedish near-masterpiece – certainly plot wise. It’s sort of Bergman with a (audience provided) laugh track. Ingmar Bergman and the Holy Grail, or Bergman’s tv sketch show, as it’s a series of vignettes. In an early sequence a depressed woman tells her companion to leave with her dog, and that it would have been better if she had not be born – but she might be persuaded to pop round later for a veal roast. (Then she sings a song - interrupted by a man in a rain coat). A driver tells us his dream of doing the old tablecloth under the crockery and cutlery trick, which results in the death sentence, and then we see it... A young woman tells a gothy-guitarist he plays good guitar and dreams she has married him. Their house appears to be a train, or anyway to run on rails. A racist demands a haircut, and the barber takes revenge by shaving a stripe across his scalp. His head fullen shaven, the racist goes to an important business meeting where the chair has a heart attack. Then there are the various members of the brass band – well, you need to be there, really.
It all builds to a doom laden climax.
It’s shot in grey and white, there is colour, but mostly lost in the fog - grey and olive - and it is definitely Scandinavian. Keep an eye on the edges of the screen and the background. Curious.
The title comes from Goethe: "Therefore rejoice, oh thou living one, blest in they lovelighted homestead, ere the dark Lethe’s sad wave wetteth they fugitive foot". Lethe is a destination of a tram in the film (or maybe a dream in the film)
Totals: 62 (Cinema: 22; DVD: 38; TV: 2)
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