This Venice Golden Lion winner is the third instalment in a loose existential trilogy from Roy Andersson, following 2000’s Songs from the Second Floor and 2007’s You, the Living. As before, the tone is one of blackly comic absurdist banality interspersed with surrealist shards – alternately hilarious, heartbreaking and horrifying. The spirits of Samuel Beckett and Spike Milligan waltz through this beige-green purgatory, a series of arresting static-camera vignettes, pasty of face, deadpan of composition.
We open with three tragicomic tableaux of death; a man expires while opening a bottle of wine; a woman clings to her handbag at heaven’s gate; a dead man’s beer and sandwich are left for the taking. Thence we meet our latterday Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of travelling novelty-items salesmen – one a “bully”, the other a “crybaby” – whose stated intention is to “help people have fun” with their vampire teeth, “Uncle One-Tooth” masks, and cackling laughter bags. Like everyone else, they have the pallor of the dead, bickering and stumbling through a netherworld in which Wednesday and Thursday have become confused and the screams of vivisected monkeys go unnoticed. Underneath it all is an anti-materialist thread, which leads to a nightmarish depiction of monstrous slavery and industrial inhumanity – the ghosts of a guilty colonial past coming back to haunt the living?
Elsewhere, a modern Gothenburg cafe is disrupted by the arrival on horseback of Charles XII, who finds the lavatory unfortunately occupied. Most memorable, however, is a rousing scene in Limping Lotte’s 40s bar where the owner doles out shots to servicemen for the price of a kiss, a community unexpectedly joined in song, a rare smile in an otherwise imperviously alienated world.
