The movie
Show notes
The latest film by the darkly absurdist Swedish director Roy Andersson tackles the vexing subject of religion. Whenever I review a film by Roy Andersson, I feel like I have to prepare my audience again for how weird the work of this Swedish writer and director is. The style is consistent: his films are composed of discrete scenes in long takes with a stationary camera, and with spare looking sets illuminated by sharp color photography. The style matches the filmmaker’s vision. Andersson shows us an absurd human society struggling to find some kind of meaning in the midst of the worst situations, a struggle conveyed by a dark sense of humor that makes us laugh even as it presses its finger right on our wounds. His new film is called About Endlessness . The style being the same doesn’t mean that it’s always the same subject. In this case, although we’re of course never told directly, a definite subject emerges. The first scene introduces a motif repeated later—two lovers are floating over the ruins of a city, like angels with arms entwined, against the background of lovely gray and white clouds. Can love, we wonder, float above the wreckage of human society, and from that vantage point glimpse an eternal truth? Next we see another couple on a park bench overlooking a city. “It’s September already,” says the woman in a gloomy voice. And so it goes. We are brought back down to time and its yearnings and discontents. Each little tableau offers a cryptic version of this contrast between transitory and eternal. Sometimes, to add to the distancing effect, a narrator explains the scene with a few words that don’t explain anything directly. So what is the subject of About Endlessness ? After awhile it becomes evident—at least it did to me—that Andersson is talking about religion and spirituality. The faulty moralism, wishful thinking, and misplaced love of ritual, but also the genuine need for meaning and purpose struggling to break through into people’s hearts. Each element
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