Review of Songs from the Second Floor (2000) by Rohit G — 26 Jun 2008

Songs From The Second Floor, is the second feature from director Roy Andersson, whose spent his career making according to fellow swedish director and legend Ingmar Bergman, "The best commercials in the world"(Youtube his name for proff of this).

And...(read more)erson takes an advertisers eye to this film and inverts it, into around 40 or 50 short vignettes, some with recurring characters, like the man seen on the cover who has burned down his buisness to collect the insurance but bumbled the job, while most include walkons, and many characters drift in an out of scenes before the movie ends.

These short vignettes are nearly all deadpan and absurdist tragi-comic advertisments for peoples lives broken or on the verge of breaking. The antagonist, if there must be one, is capitalism(a subject which the commercial making Anderson is very much aware), and it's de-humaizing effects on all its touches.

As bleak as all this sounds, the material is played more often than not for laughs. There's a traffic jam which has clogged the city as if everyone were leaving at the same time, a girl who is blindfolded and lead of a cliff by her village elders, a man accidentally sawed in half by poor magician, men and women in buisness suits walk down streets in paradees flailing themselves as an act of pennance to God so he will prevent the further falling of stocks, and a man followed around by ghosts of freinds and strangers.

If that werent enough each scene is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. The movie could be considered a tragi-comic funeral song for western capitalism and modernity(the film takes place just before the new millenium I think), but a tag like that really doesn't communicate how humane, clever, funny, and acessible this movie really is.

It's like a lyrical Monty Python film, or a an absurdist Ingmar Bergman, and yet again it's a film all it's own, structurally, conceptually, and aesthetically, if your interested in where film-making may be going in the future and right now, Songs From The Second floor, is the movie to see, and one of the best of the new millenuim.