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It is not often that a film combines dream and reality or tragedy and comedy the way that Roy Anderson's film Du Levande, You, the Living, does (Sweden, 2007). The simple title of this film simultaneously calls out to viewers and states the film's subject, "You, the Living." This film is a portrayal of the living, of the dirty, gritty, comically painful parts of life that the living experience. The film is composed of fifty vignettes portraying different aspects of life for different characters all set to the soundtrack of Dixieland jazz music partly adapted from music by ABBA's Benny Andersson. The film has many characters but the starring roles go to Elisabet Helander, Björn Englund, and Jessika Lundberg.
To give even a very brief plot summary of this film is a nearly impossible task. To fully understand the plot of this film, explanations of each vignette are necessary. The film has many story lines that rarely intersect, and these intersections are insignificant at best. There is little character development, and only one character's name is mentioned enough to commit to memory. Essentially, each vignette is a portrayal of an ordinary life occurrence that is a little bit quirkier than normal in an attempt to elicit amusement from the audience. To summarize some of the stories, there is a couple whose fights cause them to get into trouble at their work, a groupie hopelessly in love with a guitarists and dreams of their marriage, a self absorbed woman who feels as if nobody understands her and is frustrated when she receives attention from the wrong man, a carpenter who daydreams that he is put to death for breaking china, and the leader of the film's music, a man who plays the sousaphone at funerals. Clearly, the stories do not make for a coherent synopsis.
This film is billed as a comedy and in some senses, I would agree with this. However, for me, it was the kind of amusement that I get from hearing about humorous daily trials from my friends and not the kind of comedy that I usually enjoy, comedy that is seated deeply in relationships between developed characters and circumstances beyond the ordinary. And while many of the circumstances seemed beyond the ordinary, such as the man who dreamt that he was given the electric chair for breaking a two hundred year old china set, the ordinary, lighthearted humor seeps its way into every scene, manifested in this specific scene as the electric chair operator reading the manual to figure out how the chair works. The circumstances vary in their commonality, but the thread of humor based in reality is is woven through each vignette.
With depicting various life situations that are somewhat standard for the people involved, the out of place Dixieland music in the background made the film interesting, and tied the scenes together. From the first scene to the last, this lighthearted and carefree music colored the mundane backdrop of this film. Another interesting technique that added depth to the film was the choice of filter, which had an unrealistic and dreamlike quality to it, making a shot of an apartment seem more tenuous, more ethereal, less ordinary.
Personally, the humor of this film is not something I particularly enjoy but I did appreciate it for many reasons. Like I said before, this film has the incredible ability to combine the difficult messy details of reality with dreamy hopes and fears creating a film that is both amusing and saddening. Something I enjoyed about the film was that I could relate to it. I, along with all "the living," can connect with the funny mundane moments in the film where one can only respond with the phrase "such is life" and the frustrating and troubling places we can get stuck in as a result of these circumstances. The duality of the film, the fine line between reality and dream that this film dances on, is what garners it so much critical acclaim. While I may not appreciate its content, I know this film is artistically skilled and can understand how it has won awards in both the United States and the Nordic Countries, among other places.
The director of this film has said that it took three years to get all of the shots together the way he envisioned them. I think that fact speaks to the film as a whole. The complexity that was creating these sets of "ordinary" life mirrors the complexity that is "ordinary" life, in line with what I see as the film's purpose: to depict the difficult intricacy of life, in all its humorous glory.
score 6/10
engstrar-308-920037 26 April 2012
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2602714/ |
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31-1-2021 08:27:07