A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på
tillvaron) B+
Sweden Germany Norway
France (101 mi) 2014
d: Roy Andersson
The final installment of Roy Andersson’s “trilogy about
being a human being,” coming after SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) and YOU,
THE LIVING (2007), turning this into a nearly two decade long experimental view
of human existence, as seen with a modernist sensibility accentuating the
absurdity of human behavior. Perhaps
only ERASERHEAD (1977) displays this level of surrealistic artistic
sensibility, where what’s showing up onscreen could only come out of the heads
of such completely original artists, where no one else displays their level of
assuredness. While SONGS created the
most explosive impact, literally something we had never seen before, each
successive venture has been singularly unique artistically, but less effective
overall, as we are treading on familiar territory. Not sure Andersson had a trilogy in mind when
he began this project, but his initial success came from making such
successful, award-winning commercials, directing over 400 of them, which is how
he’s financed his features, though in 1975, he took a 25-year break from
directing feature films. When SONGS was
released, the film world sat up and noticed, as it seemed to come out of
nowhere, like a long absent comet that suddenly blazes across the sky. With meticulously designed sets, Andersson
took seven years to complete his next film to his exact specifications, and
another seven more to finalize the trilogy, where Andersson’s style, according
to a 2009 MOMA exhibit of his work, MoMA | Filmmaker in Focus:
Roy Andersson, is “stationary shots characterized by brilliantly conceived
tableaux, yet an essential humanity and focus on the daily lives of
working-class people.” Without ever
utilizing lead characters, his primary focus is establishing a precise look with
washed out color, creating a ghoulish and often unworldly mood, using deadpan
humor, exaggerated, heavily stylized acting that lampoons Swedish culture,
which includes a fondness for fat people, the elderly, and people so skeletal
that there is barely any flesh on their bones, their faces painted chalky white
to resemble walking corpses. Filmed in
long shots where the camera never moves, Andersson’s sketches are like paintings
that come to life, offering bleak social criticism through a heightened tone of
overly morose absurdity and a lacerating surrealism. Much like ERASERHEAD’s signature song from
the radiator, “In heaven, everything is fine,” the standard mantra heard throughout
the final chapter are recurring cellphone phone conversations, “I’m happy to
hear you’re doing fine.” Judging from
what we see onscreen, however, the world is a turbulent place with a prevalence
of misery and death always hovering nearby.
Much like the short stories of Chekhov, conventional action has been
replaced by a theater of mood and atmosphere, where instrinsic to the satirical
tone established in each sequence is a fully realized, more profound underlying
drama of realism.
The first Andersson feature to be filmed in digital, much of
what transpires takes place in Gothenburg, opening with a series of cleverly
ironic death scenes that display exaggerated morbid humor, where a man on a
cruise ship remains dead on the floor immediately after ordering a sandwich and
a beer, with ship officials hovering over him, and while his inert body remains
the focus of the frame, the waitress is forced to ask the surrounding diners if
any would care for a free meal. One
elderly customer expresses an interest in the beer, nearly stepping over the
body to retrieve it. Accentuating the
ridiculousness of the human condition, we are introduced to a hapless pair of
traveling salesmen, Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom), two
dour and humorless men who have come to collect their share of the earnings
from the sale of their products in a small shop, discussing the inventory of
specific novelty items, like rubber masks or plastic vampire teeth, with the
saleswoman behind the counter. But when they
ask for money, she steps behind the door to ask her unseen husband what to do,
telling them to come back in a few days, a tactic they refuse, as they’ve sent
them repeated notices and it’s now time to pay up. When it becomes evident they mean business,
the door finally opens a sliver and we catch a glimpse of the man in the back
still dressed in his robe, lying on the sofa, as if watching TV, where we hear
his screaming cries yelling at the top of his lungs, “We have no money!” as the
men are seen repossessing what few items remain in the shop. It’s hard to decide where to place one’s
sympathies, as each side is equally pathetic, but it does illustrate how close
to the edge many people exist. Andersson
borrows the music from the end of Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961), a barebones
Rockabilly rock ‘n’ roll song called “Shimmy Doll,” Ashley Beaumont - Shimmy Doll
- YouTube (2:00), where customers in a contemporary bar are playing it on
the jukebox, when two soldiers dressed in 17th century army uniforms open the
bar doors and stand guard, announcing the arrival of Swedish King Charles XII
(Viktor Gyllenberg), a particularly militaristic figure known for his
bloodthirsty aggression who reigned from 1697 to 1718, entering on his horse,
ordering all the women out of the bar, attacking them with whips, having his
men assault another man who he identifies as “a sneaky Russian,” chasing him
down the street, whipping him all the way, expressing the pent-up furor and
rage of men marching off to war to invade Russia. Later on we see the remains of a ragtag group
of walking wounded, tattered and beaten, retreating from battle, where the
exact same circumstance plays out with the men standing guard at the door before
the announcement of the King, whose horse is pulled into the bar with the King
lying over the saddle. His men pull him
off into a chair, as it’s announced he needs to use the toilet. One of his men checks the security of the
facilities, only to return with the humiliating announcement that the King will
have to wait, as the toilet is currently occupied. Somehow all the previous fire and brimstone
is gone, as instead the King must languish in his own private torment.
The title was inspired by the 16th century painting The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel
the Elder, a rural wintertime scene where the birds perched in the branches of
the tree in the foreground have a panoramic view overlooking all, where
Andersson imagines what they might be thinking about the actions and strange
mannerisms of humans. Winner of the
Golden Lion for Best Film at Venice, where the competition included Birdman
or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Black
Souls (Anime Nere), and Manglehorn,
where it’s easy to see how Andersson’s cryptic vision could stand out. Two scenes are perhaps most significant, one
is a euphoric musical centerpiece sequence in a beer hall known as Limping
Lotta’s in Gothenburg, where the bar hostess yells in the ear of an elderly
customer asking if he’d like another drink, which of course he does, once
awakened to the reality, where she announces he’s been drinking every night in
the same establishment for 60 years.
“That’s a lot of shots,” someone suggests. The scene suddenly shifts to the same man
sitting in the same bar in 1943, where Lotta and her entire customer base break
out into song, A
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence clip - Limping Lotta YouTube
(2:58), creating a delightful piece of living musical theater that continually
builds in intensity, becoming a ravishing Brechtian spectacle of proper beer
hall decorum, where everyone can get a shot of liquor in exchange for a
kiss. This is as intensely exciting as
the film becomes, drawing the audience into the social implications of a small
moment in history. The other has darker
and much more tragic implications, which is immediately evident to viewers, as
the sweeping historical context stands out in a film that otherwise contains
small comically absurd vignettes, so there’s a growing awareness as this
sequence proceeds. Black slaves tied
together by ropes and chains are herded by Colonial-era British soldiers into a
giant cylinder drum made by Boliden (a Swedish mining company sued and
determined responsible for toxic poisoning in Chile in the 1980’s from tons of
melted copper residue left behind on waste dumps where children routinely
played) with what appears to be musical airholes. Once locked in, the cylinder turns over a
burning fire, like a rotisserie, as the slaves are literally roasted alive, yet
break out into song, where screams are mysteriously transformed into a kind of
mournful music, where an upper class establishment nearby of elderly rich
dressed in formal evening wear opens the doors leading to a terrace view to
observe the evening’s sinister entertainment as a hostess fills their glasses
with champagne. It’s a diabolical
metaphor for the horrors inflicted by European colonialism where the viewers
literally can’t believe their eyes.
Overall, each of the 39 filmed vignettes is elegantly defined by the
easily understood simplicity on display, where there is little to no action,
but the power of suggestion from each sequence builds up over time, creating a
kind of skewed and imbalanced universe where humans are known to roam. While dramatically inert, much of this is
compacted into cleverly designed tiny packages that are visually inspired and
simply unforgettable.
