A Pigeon Sat On A Bench Reflecting On Existence (12A.)
Directed by Roy Andersson.
Starring Holger Andersson, Nisse Vestblom, Viktor Gyllenberg and Roger Olsen Likvern. In Swedish with subtitles.101 mins
The master returns! Roy Andersson's latest film completes a trilogy of reflections on what it means to be human that began with 1999's Songs From The Second Floor and continued with You, The Living in 2007. If you've never seen one of these films then you are in for both a massive surprise and delight. If you have, it's just going to be a massive delight. It's inexplicably hilarious and inexplicably moving – all you could possibly want from a film.
A Pigeon is another plotless, diffuse exploration of modern life. Andersson labours away up in Sweden in his Studio 24, painstakingly taking years to make his films. He laborious constructs sets that are both incredibly lifelike but wholly fake and into these he places actors who have been made up to look like deathly pale caricatures. He shoots a series of surreal/ mundane/ hilarious vignettes that occasionally have some vague connection with moments that preceded. These scenes are shot without cuts and close ups; the static camera keeps a polite (or maybe callous) distance at all times. The world he creates is like a parallel afterlife; our world populated by cadavers and cast under a perpetual gloom. It's the slapstick of the living dead.
In Pigeon the central figures are a pair of glum novelty joke shop travelling salesman. Every Andersson film has a catchphrase. In Pigeon it is their deadpan assertion that, “We want to help people have a good time.” His humour can seem cruel and more than a little stoutist. Andersson, a not so svelte figure himself, likes to fill the sets with mournful tubbies and in the second scene - there are 39 in all - we are invited to laugh at a fatty keeling over of a heart attack as he tries to open a bottle of wine. At times he risks seeming condescending and reductive, but there always compassion and bizarre moments of droll invention to lift us up again. He tears humanity down into nothing, yet what remains seems filled with wonders.
Andersson hasn't much changed or advanced his way of making films over the course of his trilogy and, to be coldly objective, this is probably less impressive than the previous two. About half an hour in I realised that it really didn't matter: to once again be under the pull of his images was uniquely thrilling. If he's stuck in a rut, it's a rut of genius and A Pigeon is a lugubrious, hilarious, touching miracle; a kind of dream cinema. Andersson is the director I was yearning for all the years I spent trudging through those works of the great masters – an arthouse movie maker who was as entertaining as he was impressive.
A Pigeon Sat On A Bench Reflecting On Existence (12A.)
Directed by Roy Andersson.
Starring Holger Andersson, Nisse Vestblom, Viktor Gyllenberg and Roger Olsen Likvern. In Swedish with subtitles.101 mins
The master returns! Roy Andersson's latest film completes a trilogy of reflections on what it means to be human that began with 1999's Songs From The Second Floor and continued with You, The Living in 2007. If you've never seen one of these films then you are in for both a massive surprise and delight. If you have, it's just going to be a massive delight. It's inexplicably hilarious and inexplicably moving – all you could possibly want from a film.
A Pigeon is another plotless, diffuse exploration of modern life. Andersson labours away up in Sweden in his Studio 24, painstakingly taking years to make his films. He laborious constructs sets that are both incredibly lifelike but wholly fake and into these he places actors who have been made up to look like deathly pale caricatures. He shoots a series of surreal/ mundane/ hilarious vignettes that occasionally have some vague connection with moments that preceded. These scenes are shot without cuts and close ups; the static camera keeps a polite (or maybe callous) distance at all times. The world he creates is like a parallel afterlife; our world populated by cadavers and cast under a perpetual gloom. It's the slapstick of the living dead.
In Pigeon the central figures are a pair of glum novelty joke shop travelling salesman. Every Andersson film has a catchphrase. In Pigeon it is their deadpan assertion that, “We want to help people have a good time.” His humour can seem cruel and more than a little stoutist. Andersson, a not so svelte figure himself, likes to fill the sets with mournful tubbies and in the second scene - there are 39 in all - we are invited to laugh at a fatty keeling over of a heart attack as he tries to open a bottle of wine. At times he risks seeming condescending and reductive, but there always compassion and bizarre moments of droll invention to lift us up again. He tears humanity down into nothing, yet what remains seems filled with wonders.
Andersson hasn't much changed or advanced his way of making films over the course of his trilogy and, to be coldly objective, this is probably less impressive than the previous two. About half an hour in I realised that it really didn't matter: to once again be under the pull of his images was uniquely thrilling. If he's stuck in a rut, it's a rut of genius and A Pigeon is a lugubrious, hilarious, touching miracle; a kind of dream cinema. Andersson is the director I was yearning for all the years I spent trudging through those works of the great masters – an arthouse movie maker who was as entertaining as he was impressive.
