That isn't to say that The Living will illicit uproarious guffaws or belly laughs immediately. At one point, a man is forced into an electric chair while being told 'Try to think of something else' by the small mob of suited men who strap him in and prepare to throw the switch. His crime? Ruining a dining-room set that was over 200 years old. Later on, a psychiatrist admits he's tired of trying to make mean people happy and a snobby, brandy-sniffing ultra-capitalist insists that quality is not for the general public.
Opening with and deriving its title from a line in Goethe's The Roman Elegies, Andersson has created his own epistolary comedy by weaving sight gags, dreary and delicate fantasies, ludicrous nightmares, and a small Lousiana brass band with confessionals, minor morality plays, and unrequited romances. Reality and the unreal have coalesced in this vision of humanity as one of breathing undead, but it also disguises a surprising humanist viewpoint.
Andersson is, at heart, an expert absurdist; to him, there is meaning in the meaningless and salvation in the ridiculous. Take a moment near the end of the film: A young woman (Jessika Lundberg) stands in a bar and tells the audience (and anyone who will listen) her dream of marrying a rock 'n' roll singer. Where one might imagine a big church wedding or a small ceremony on the beach, Andersson transports us to a building that runs on train tracks. Inside one apartment, the rocker serenades his bride with a solo while she looks through their gifts; at one point the train stops so the entire town can say congratulations to the newlyweds. It's pure, blissful lunacy, even if we must return to the saturnine now.
A fanatic of German expressionism, Andersson spent much of his career doing insurance commercials and adopted his one-take style from that short, snappy comedic work. His films, as one might expect, have become even more painterly over the years. Songs from the Second Floor was a hazy drift through a very particular land of nothingness; You, the Living, though equally cloudy, is more fully formed and tightly packed.
At one point, a pack of commuters get off a train destined for Lethe -- Latin for forgetfulness -- and stand in the torrential rain as it moves on. Part of the film's hypnosis comes from this disavowal of any meaningful truth in realism, a style that Andersson himself practiced in the 1970s when he began making films. Living certainly is an eerie film and even, at moments, a haunting one, but it does not strike me as depressing. The bartender in the film is known to say, 'Tomorrow is another day.' Whether or not that is a condemnation is really a matter of opinion.
Aka Du levande.
