magda_butra Andersson is not using a typical plot. He presents couple of stories, which may or may not relate to one another. They don't have to comment on each other, comment on life, say anything at all. If there are connections between the scenes or the characters, they are not important. A particular scene can be a pearl by itself. All are shot from one angle, with no cut. All the colours are typically Swedish - monochrome, faded pastels, beige, brown and grey, no intensity (thanks to this measure whenever the director uses a vibrant colour it catches the eye immediately). All the sceneries are very Swedish as well - the interiors are very simple, with almost no decorations, showing only useful items. Andersson shows mainly the inside of the flats, but whenever he goes on the streets, he follows this pattern - modernistic architecture with clean cuts of the brick, faded shades of the colours. He uses all the most Swedish surroundings that he can find. But is he showing Swedish society?There are samples of life, which are undoubtedly Swedish, there are processes, which can be found in several societies. For the former I might mention a scene with drinking songs. I know, it's basically a human quality to sing and drink, but Swedes have some unique lyrics and games, known across all counties and generations. For the latter there is of course Nazism, hidden in the movie and in Swedish society as well and this may apply to other countries. Sweden is such an interesting case for that - as a country neutral during the second world war, brining humanitarian help, on the other hand having many supporters of this ideology.Andersson is showing different aspects of life - conflict in the marriage, children taking advantage of their parents, lost love, loneliness, Nazism. Those might be universal issues, affecting all humans, taken up by numerous artists so far. In You, the Living Andersson is playing smoothly with all measures possible. It's hard to judge the movie as a whole, I enjoyed particular scenes. Maybe they are pure absurd, mumbling, overdrawn. Maybe there is a meaning, message, interpretation. Andersson is surprising me with absurdity of life, not always so unexpected. He surprises me with normality. One does not have to be a freak to be weird.

Roedy Green "You the Living" is quite unlike other movies. It is more like a series of quasi-comic sketches, or perhaps even a series of photographs of animated paintings. It opens with a man sleeping, for what seems an eternity. You must relax into the slow pace, that proceeds much the way real life does with long periods of the same thing happening, with what's interesting confined to a tiny dot of the screen, like watching a plane wreck from great distance. It is set in a very bleak, rainy, cold foggy Norway where interiors are painted shades of hospital green, and lit with cold fluorescent light. The actors are nearly all overweight or over 65. Only a tiny handful of the enormous cast could be considered photogenic. Nearly everyone is unreasonably grumpy and seriously depressed. The theme is selfishness results in ordinary cruelties. People create their own misery with their self-absorption. You have to stand back and see the humour or you too could be smothered in the gloom.

engstrar-308-920037 It is not often that a film combines dream and reality or tragedy and comedy the way that Roy Anderson's film Du Levande, You, the Living, does (Sweden, 2007). The simple title of this film simultaneously calls out to viewers and states the film's subject, "You, the Living." This film is a portrayal of the living, of the dirty, gritty, comically painful parts of life that the living experience. The film is composed of fifty vignettes portraying different aspects of life for different characters all set to the soundtrack of Dixieland jazz music partly adapted from music by ABBA's Benny Andersson. The film has many characters but the starring roles go to Elisabet Helander, Björn Englund, and Jessika Lundberg.To give even a very brief plot summary of this film is a nearly impossible task. To fully understand the plot of this film, explanations of each vignette are necessary. The film has many story lines that rarely intersect, and these intersections are insignificant at best. There is little character development, and only one character's name is mentioned enough to commit to memory. Essentially, each vignette is a portrayal of an ordinary life occurrence that is a little bit quirkier than normal in an attempt to elicit amusement from the audience. To summarize some of the stories, there is a couple whose fights cause them to get into trouble at their work, a groupie hopelessly in love with a guitarists and dreams of their marriage, a self absorbed woman who feels as if nobody understands her and is frustrated when she receives attention from the wrong man, a carpenter who daydreams that he is put to death for breaking china, and the leader of the film's music, a man who plays the sousaphone at funerals. Clearly, the stories do not make for a coherent synopsis.This film is billed as a comedy and in some senses, I would agree with this. However, for me, it was the kind of amusement that I get from hearing about humorous daily trials from my friends and not the kind of comedy that I usually enjoy, comedy that is seated deeply in relationships between developed characters and circumstances beyond the ordinary. And while many of the circumstances seemed beyond the ordinary, such as the man who dreamt that he was given the electric chair for breaking a two hundred year old china set, the ordinary, lighthearted humor seeps its way into every scene, manifested in this specific scene as the electric chair operator reading the manual to figure out how the chair works. The circumstances vary in their commonality, but the thread of humor based in reality is is woven through each vignette.With depicting various life situations that are somewhat standard for the people involved, the out of place Dixieland music in the background made the film interesting, and tied the scenes together. From the first scene to the last, this lighthearted and carefree music colored the mundane backdrop of this film. Another interesting technique that added depth to the film was the choice of filter, which had an unrealistic and dreamlike quality to it, making a shot of an apartment seem more tenuous, more ethereal, less ordinary.Personally, the humor of this film is not something I particularly enjoy but I did appreciate it for many reasons. Like I said before, this film has the incredible ability to combine the difficult messy details of reality with dreamy hopes and fears creating a film that is both amusing and saddening. Something I enjoyed about the film was that I could relate to it. I, along with all "the living," can connect with the funny mundane moments in the film where one can only respond with the phrase "such is life" and the frustrating and troubling places we can get stuck in as a result of these circumstances. The duality of the film, the fine line between reality and dream that this film dances on, is what garners it so much critical acclaim. While I may not appreciate its content, I know this film is artistically skilled and can understand how it has won awards in both the United States and the Nordic Countries, among other places.The director of this film has said that it took three years to get all of the shots together the way he envisioned them. I think that fact speaks to the film as a whole. The complexity that was creating these sets of "ordinary" life mirrors the complexity that is "ordinary" life, in line with what I see as the film's purpose: to depict the difficult intricacy of life, in all its humorous glory.

tombrookes2007 The Swedish film is billed as a comedic meditation, but for me it was just too arty, cold and a study from a warped artistic mind. There are apparently 50 ironic vignettes in this film, whereby a mainly muted story made from rolling scenes of uncomfortable nonsense combines visions of bored individuals, with a link to musical instruments. The film could be interpreted as deep, meaningful and different but most will see it for the art for arts sake tripe study of expression that makes art so subjective and personal. Be in the mood, for enlightenment, and see what you can draw from this piece of film.Here, filmmaker Roy Andersson draws the viewer into the world of a woman whose most uplifting moments are always balanced by tragedy, and whose joy is constantly offset by sorrow. This comic tragedy of life manifests itself in a manner that all can surely relate to, it's just whether YOU GET IT