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Roy Andersson

‘YOU, THE LIVING’, BY ROY ANDERSSON, WAS THE MOST DERANGING FILM SHOWN AT THE 60th CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson finally revealed YOU, THE LIVING, the most deranging film in the whole selection of the 60th Cannes Film Festival. If his first films were inspired by Italian neo-realism, especially by “The Bicycle Thief”, by Vittorio de Sica, YOU, THE LIVING gives wings and freedom to his imagination as in surrealist films by Luis Buñuel, says Andersson. “Especially the freedom of dreaming in THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, in which one of the characters says ‘I had a dream yesterday’, and then we watch the dream”.

Dreams and reality in YOU, THE LIVING perplexes the spectator facing life’s tragicomedies. Along 50 sequences of chronometric precision, mostly in long shots, wide fixed angles, we see the great comedy of life, because, according to the brilliant filmmaker, the greatest innovator of our times, “living is so complicated to each one of us, that the only thing that saves us is sense of humor”.

He reveals more in his notes on YOU, THE LIVING. “The film talks about human nature, its greatness and misery, happiness and sorrow, self-confidence and anxiety. About this human nature we laugh at and for which we cry too. The film is simply a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy of which we are the subject. After neo-realism and the cinema of absurd, what I am trying now is to introduce trivialism”.

Roy Andersson has a career that is dreamed of by many filmmakers around the world. He patiently conquered the most convenient means to work with the most easiness the freedom of expression. His first feature, A SWEDISH LOVE STORY, won the Berlinale in 1970. Six years later, in 1976, GILIAP, his second feature, was shown at the Directors’ Fortnight. But what guaranteed the over life of the ever-deranging style was advertisement, a cinema of many resources for a few seconds, in which he engaged in as early as 1975. His short advertisement films were very successful and won eight Golden Lions in Cannes. Roy Andersson’s recognition and publicity made possible for him the creation of Studio 24, at the old telegraphic station in Stockholm, where he drove his dedication back to fiction films with total freedom. Then came the short films SOMETHING HAPPENED (1987) and WORLD OF GLORY (1991). In fact, it took him 32 patient years to conclude a feature film again, and that was the acclaimed SONG FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000). And now, other seven years later, the deranged and breathtaking YOU, THE LIVING, his fourth feature in 37 years.

YOU, THE LIVING is inspired by the sad Roman Elegies, by Goethe, from which Andersson extracts the following sentence: “Therefore rejoice, oh thou living one, blest in they lovelighted homestead, ere the dark Lethe’s sad wave wetteth they fugetive foot”. The frames in which his living-dead react have pictorial inspiration, from Millet, Delacroix and Van Gogh. The detail is the approach of almost monochrome images to olive green.

The sequences, even though fixed, end up being connected. Characters, as ghosts, appear in scenes without context. Andersson says he wants to create scenes and sceneries so intense and refined that the spectators will wish to see it all again. “My films defy conventional narrative structures in cinema. It is my way of teasing”.

The anthology of cinema will certainly save a special room for several of the sequences in this new film by Roy Andersson. For the punk woman who curses her partner and the world that won’t understand her; for the trump player who rehearsals in his apartment, driving his wife and neighbors to despair; for the lonely drunkards in a bar and the bartender who tolls a bell every night to announce the final round of drinks; for the rocker and his honeymoon in a train house-wagon; for the lost carpet salesman after a fight with his wife. In short, for so many deranging situations of human tragicomedy. Living seems to be a victory in itself, when facing so many probations that blur our existence. Roy Andersson works the art of Swedish cinema of welling out of limbo its so many tormented souls. CINEMA above critics by any aesthetes. Cinema for cinema-goers.

More information in :
www.festival-cannes.org

English version: Laura Rebessi

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