With its 39-episode fragmented structure and its absolutely unmoving camera, this Swedish film is a sweeping still life survey of modern daily life, like the Peter Breughel the Elder painting of hunters from which the title is drawn.The film is as ascetic in its monotones and monochromes as in its static camera.
Writer/director Roy Andersson’s title may have an additional reference: “En duva…” echoes the hilarious short 1968 parody that George Coe and Anthony Lover did of Ingmar Bergman’s themes and aesthetics during his early prime. The new film’s primary theme is the miseries of life, a hardy Bergman concern played more deadpan than anguished here.
Andersson’s spirit is playful and parodic. Several characters on the phone tell the people they’re chatting with “I’m glad to hear everything is fine with you.” But we see no joy on screen, except for the laughing diners in the restaurant that only emphasizes the unfortunate lonely army man’s misery outside.
Indeed the first fragment, the first of three Visits from Death, is a happy domestic scene in which, while the wife prepares dinner, humming in tune with the soundtrack, the husband tries to uncork a wine bottle and dies of a heart attack.
The film eschews sentimentality. In the second episode three adults try to wrestle the treasure-trove handbag out of their dying mother’s croaking grasp. Later, a maudlin song will depress salesman Jonathan with the idea that he will see his parents again in heaven. And they were nice to him.
Jonathan and partner Sam are the two mainline figures. They try to “sell fun” but can’t get buyers, can’t get paid by the odd buyer they find, and therefore can’t pay their suppliers. The film is rife with such deadpan deadbeats. The “fun” these men are offering are bathetic novelties: vampire teeth, a laughter bag and an Uncle One Tooth mask.
In fact, bathos rules. Parodies abound, as in the several versions of Battle Hymn of the Republic. In the last episode, people waiting at a bus stop, a man stopping to refill his bike tires, another puzzled to learn that it’s Wednesday, not Thursday, our daily lives are defined as trivial antitheses to heroism and meaning.
As this man doesn’t know where he is in the week, the film admits two historical intrusions, i.e., where are we in the larger movements of time? Both expand the characters’ misery and emptiness to the larger state. Sweden is confronted with Jonathan’s late-night philosophizing: “Is it right to use someone else just for your purpose?”
In the first King Charles XII rides into a contemporary bar, leading his troops into valiant battle. Later he returns beaten, battered, broken by “the sly Russian” who apparently armed themselves without notice. The king has to wait for someone using the bar toilet. The women in the bar wail at having been widowed.
The second historical episode has a colonial troop herd chained and shackled black citizens, including women and children, into a huge copper drum, which as it rotates over a pool of burning oil kills them. This may be the dream Jonathan immediately reports, but it is still an allusion to a historic misdeed. The cylinder bears the name Boliden, the company whose sale of smelting to Chile in the 1980s led to charges that hundreds of citizens, including children, were poisoned by the waste site.
As the film moves away from its first three death scenes, its overall movement might be defined as our denial of mortality. Those “fun” products are a bathetic summary of the diversions we seek in life to avoid recognizing our mortal limits. Hence the deaf man drinking on his stupor, the limping barmaid who sells the penniless a shot for a kiss, and all the sad characters Jonathan and Sam meet in their pathetic attempt to sell them fun. In that light the film may also reflect upon its own nature and structure and existence, that is, reflect upon the Swedish commercial film industry which — like any other nation’s —provides empty anodynes to its sad citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment