76 min | NR | April 30, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
A man and woman drift over a ruined city while a voice catalogs the strangers below. Roy Andersson stages the whole of human existence as a series of motionless gray tableaux. It sounds like a slog. It plays like a miracle.
A man and a woman float over a bombed city in the opening shot. A voice narrates the small and enormous things she sees below. Roy Andersson builds his film from these fragments. Each scene is a single static tableau of ordinary people doing ordinary things in a world drained of color and certainty. The film is not about plot. It is about the weight of being alive and the small mercies and cruelties that fill the time between birth and death.
The cast works in deliberate stillness, and the restraint is the point. Jan-Eje Ferling plays the Man at the Stairs with the slumped posture of someone who has stopped expecting anything. Martin Serner plays the Priest who has lost his faith and keeps showing up to work anyway, and his quiet panic in front of his psychiatrist lands as both comic and unbearable. Bengt Bergius plays that Psychiatrist with bureaucratic indifference, glancing at his watch while a man begs for help. Magnus Wallgren appears as a defeated Adolf Hitler in a bunker, a figure of total ruin staged without a single raised voice. The actors do not perform emotion so much as endure it.
Andersson writes and directs every frame as a painter composes a canvas. He shoots each scene in one fixed wide shot with no camera movement and no cutting inside the moment. The desaturated gray-green palette and the chalk-pale faces flatten everyone into the same muted register. The deep-focus staging keeps the foreground and the background equally sharp, so a tiny human gesture and a vast empty sky carry the same visual weight. The compositions are so controlled that the smallest movement inside the frame becomes an event.
This is a film about endlessness as both promise and sentence. The repeated narration of “I saw a man” and “I saw a woman” turns strangers into a catalog of the species. Andersson finds the deadpan comedy in despair and the despair underneath the comedy, and he refuses to rank one above the other. The film offers no resolution because endlessness has no resolution. It simply continues, and Andersson has the discipline to let it.