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You, the Living
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Light Without Mercy
The address to any prospective
audience is immediately stern, Olympian, unforgiving, via a quote from Goethe: You, the Living – you who, basically,
are counting out the days, waiting for death to arrive. No wonder the title was
(in translation) softened, in some territories, to We, the Living – although that alteration, finally, does not add
much comfort.
A
film that begins with a nightmare anxiously recounted by a typical Everyman,
and ends with the likely saturation-bombing of a city – the very conclusion
forecast by the initial nightmare – includes us all in its blackly comic curse,
whether you or we.
But in the blackness, there is comedy – and very richly so. There is
more than a touch of Jacques Tati in the cinema of
Swedish master Roy Andersson – particularly in the
mature period inaugurated by Songs from
the Second Floor (2000) and continued by You, the Living. (The double influence of Tati and Andersson is evident on Elia Suleiman’s Divine
Intervention, 2002.)
Andersson’s portraits of urban
life are constructed on a fertile paradox: while they often show people in
states of acute solitude, raging or crying or singing in their misery, the wide
frames almost always show that individual in relation to a group, community or
social context. A group that is, more often not, entirely constituted by atomised
individuals, lost in their own reverie – and sometimes given the freedom to
directly address us, the living, through the camera lens.
But Andersson’s art is to show – to us, if not to his
characters – the similarities between these people, their odd moments of
mirroring, exchange, even a kind of dialogue, albeit a dialogue of the mutually
deaf.
Near the start of You, the Living, a woman (Elisabeth Helander)
sitting on a bench wails out her despair, asking at one point, “Is it strange
to pray?” – and, right on cue, a man (one of many,
anonymous observers hidden inside or at the edges of Andersson’s frames) steps out from behind a tree to answer her, sympathetically, but
unheard by the woman: “No, it’s OK”.
In this same moment, a bit of
cinematic magic is also taking place. A minute or so ago, as this woman angrily
instructed her boyfriend (and their dog Bobbo) to
“piss off” – not forgetting to add, as an afterthought, “I might be over in a
while” – music began, softly and slowly fading up. It’s jolly, trad jazz music,
featuring banjo and tuba – not quite classy enough for a Woody Allen film, but
in that vein. And when it reaches the right volume, the woman’s spoken words modulate
themselves into the rhyming couplets of a song – with even that strange
observer becoming, for a moment, part of the performance. It is a special
example of what Tom Gunning once observed happening in Fritz Lang’s equally
singular musical, You and Me (1938):
a “transcendent, supra-diegetic music”, a “gradual enchantment”
that renders the entire world “as if infected by rhythm or melody, given over
to pure expressivity”.
We will find many traces of this pure
expressivity in You, the Living. But transcendent, it ain’t. Andersson is a master at
crafting small, concentrated vignettes of disappointment, hopelessness,
frustration and banality in everyday life.
People, such as a teacher crying in
front of her young students, experience sudden, embarrassing surges of emotion
in public situations. Long-time couples talk snippily, at cross purposes; old
folks zone out in nursing homes. The ticket queue that one chooses at the train
station is always the wrong one, instantly full of people ahead of you. Even
the animals don’t escape from this general, existential pit: a poor dog is
dragged on a leash along the street, on his back, whimpering, in an early
tableau.
Andersson generally
uses the structure of an episodic mosaic – isolated and self-contained incidents
given coherence, interconnection and consistency by his manner of staging and
filming, as well as by the use of certain sites, such as an apartment block
where diverse characters live, or a few neighbouring streets, or even a whole
city (as in You, the Living).
Whenever Andersson breaks this general structure in order to connect several episodes in a chain
of narrative cause-and-effect, the outcome is always outrageous: a vagrant (Waldemar Novak) in a restaurant who deftly pickpockets the
wallet of a blowhard businessman in one scene, is shown in the next having
himself decked out in the finest clothes, and giving orders to the shop’s
servers like an aristocrat.
In a particularly wonderful sequence
of scenes, we follow the rapid, downhill path of a carpenter (Leif Larsson) who
performs a disastrous stunt with a dinner table cloth – and ends up, after a
trial, being electrocuted for it.
It is a testament to the peculiar
effect of Andersson’s movies on their spectators
that, a few years after seeing You, the Living, I
misremembered the carpenter’s bad dream as an actual, real series of plot
events in the film’s world. In fact, dreams and reality are extremely close in Andersson’s cinema – although the line separating them is
always made perfectly clear, unlike the games of indistinction that David Cronenberg or Luis Buńuel play with
these realms.
As in the opening and closing of You, the Living, dreams can serve as deadly
accurate prophecies or premonitions. At other moments, they express impossible
longings. The absolute highlight of the film, in this regard, is the
spectacular fantasy sequence of the honeymoon between a lovestruck girl (Jessika Lundberg) and her pop star idol, Micke Larsson (Eric Bäckman) – their
rooms revealed to be in motion, pulling into a train station, where a vast
crowd of well-wishers (including the tuba player ubiquitously spotted
throughout the film) have nothing but love to give. Unlike in
real life.
Andersson has
expressed his regret that, for once, he was unable to film that entire
honeymoon scene in one, unbroken, choreographed take. He shouldn’t worry too
much: the cut that takes us from inside the lovers’ room, then to out on the
platform amidst the crowd as the train rolls on – Micke,
all the while, playing a live guitar solo on top of the music playback – is
among the most glorious in cinema, perfectly timed and positioned in the surprising
way it relates two, very different camera positions.
But this example brings us to the
matter of Andersson’s style as a filmmaker, so precise,
systematic and unique – bathed in what he calls a “light without mercy”, devoid
of shadows where anyone can hide. Where does this style sit in the whole
panoply of cinema?
In
a splendid roundtable discussion
at MUBI Notebook, the great film
scholar Dudley Andrew summarised the position of his 2010 book What Cinema Is! – its ideal of a “cinema of discovery” – in the following terms:
There is a technology
that can gather and organise; a point of view (which
can be a plural point of view) that filters or focuses; and a situation that is
amorphous and otherwise undefined, but which comes into an unstable, momentary
coordination in the event of the film.
The element of instability – which Andrew also calls friction – is crucial to this vision.
There has to be, in his model, something beyond the director, something he or
she wrestles with, in order to create this friction; that something can be the
unpredictable co-ordinates of real weather and light; or it could be the
challenge of creating a long take with a bulky camera, and many elements in the
frame to organise, but without the possibility of
digital touch-ups or smoothings-out. We have to feel
that something, at any moment, could go wrong – and that, sometimes, this very
error will become part of the beauty of a shot, a scene or a moment.
A certain family of film directors is thereby
privileged for Dudley Andrew, as for many cinephiles:
Kenji Mizoguchi, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Satyajit Ray, the Brittany films of Jean Epstein, or more
recently Lisandro Alonso, José Luis Torres Leiva, Lav Diaz, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and other
practitioners of plein-air ‘slow cinema’. This is overwhelmingly a cinema of nature, of
the open air, of wind and rain and dirt, of the world. A
cinema in which the elements of chance, spontaneity and surprise play a crucial,
even constitutive role.
The opposite of discovery, in cinema, is control – that “mastery of the universe”
which can be wielded by a filmmaker, ambivalently evoked by Godard in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). Control of every element: setting, lighting, framing, the
performer’s gesture. Where the ethos of discovery prizes nature, the cinema of
control revels in artifice: the more plastic, the better, because it can be
more completely controlled.
But this cinema of artifice has a long and honorable
lineage, at least as great as the cinema of discovery: any tradition that
includes Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Ernst Lubitsch, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger,
Brian De Palma and Dario Argento among its
figureheads cannot be all bad!
Roy Andersson represents the
extreme example of a cinema of control. The time he takes (three years in the
case of You, the Living); the
production circumstances (such as his own Studio 24) that he has established in
order to enable his patient, gradual method; his habit of breaking off a shoot
in order to make a few commercials that allow further financing to be plowed
back into the pet project; his perfectionism that results (as with Kubrick) in
dozens of takes for each tableau – these are the external signs or conditions
of his art.
However, it is in the aesthetic parameters – inside
each frame and at each moment of the sound design – that we need to closely look
to establish Andersson’s style.
As any behind-the-scenes documentation on the DVD
releases of Andersson’s films reveal, every single
element in his cinematic work since Songs
from the Second Floor is unreal, artificial. This includes views of cities
glimpsed outside windows, landscapes and every cluster of city streets. He
regularly uses tricks of forced perspective and other optical illusions that
designers have known and exploited since quite early in cinema history. The aim
is to create absolute consistency of colour, texture
and light; as well as total control of his performers’ poise, gesture, speed
and rhythm of movement.
The result is, for me, breathtaking – and deeply
comical. Mastery of the universe has never been put to better or more
expressive use. The more you watch and re-watch Andersson’s recent films, the more attune you become to the weight and effect of the
slightest movement or modulation inside the frame.
Occasional alterations to the static tableau set-up –
such as the backward-track of the camera as a sad psychiatrist (Hakan Angser) makes his way,
along the gauntlet of anxious, waiting patients, to his office – preserve their
power through this minimal, restrained deployment. Surreal, sidelong details –
like a painting on the wall dropping into a fish tank – proliferate, and become
more delicious when you know they are coming.
The conditions for magical transcendence, even in
one’s dreams, are fragile in You, the Living.
After the teenage girl has finished telling (and the film visualising)
her honeymoon fantasy, a nearby drinker (as last drinks are called and
everyone scrambles to the bar), inspired by the girl’s narration, also starts
in on recounting his recent dream of flying. But hardly anyone is listening,
and no one cares.
The dream, in his case, does not exert any power of
enchantment over the film itself: he does not command the camera eye, his size
and position in the frame remain minor, and there is no extravagant visualisation of the kind we have just witnessed. His dream
falls into a void, pathetically and hilariously – as for so many of us who, in
daily life, try to share our dreams with others.
You, the Living eventually became the middle plank
of a trilogy; A Pigeon Sat on a Branch
Reflecting on Existence followed it seven years later in 2014. Although Andersson promised a new style, and a change in his usual
production procedures, it was a disappointing film. You, the Living, at this point in time, remains his summit.
© Adrian Martin June 2014 |