Was it a comedy? Was it a tragedy? A historical romp or an existential drama? Nobody, it seems, could quite explain Roy Andersson’s bizarre picture A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence when it landed last week at the 71st Venice film festival, although many felt they were in the presence of an eccentric new masterpiece. Fortunately the festival jury are in agreement - rushing to crown Andersson’s film with the prestigious Golden Lion award.
Billed as “the final part of a trilogy about being a human being,” Pigeon follows on from the Swedish director’s earlier art-house films Songs From the Second Floor and You, the Living. In attempting to pin down the film’s curious pedigree, critcs have compared it to everything from Ingmar Bergman to Laurel and Hardy.
Andersson’s movie plays out as a series of 39 absurdist comic vignettes, trailing a pair of forlorn traveling salesmen around modern-day Gothenberg. At intervals, however, the tale flashes back to a 1940s saloon and to Sweden’s 18th-century invasion of Russia. Arriving unannounced at a greasy-spoon cafe, an outraged King Charles XII orders that the male diners be drafted and the women thrown out.
While Pigeon soared, Birdman crashed. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s ambitious backstage melodrama won rave reviews when it opened the festival, and yet goes home empty handed. The three other American pictures in competition - 99 Homes, Manglehorn, Good Kill - also failed to pick up prizes, reflecting what critics have identified as a general shift away from US produce at this year’s event.
Elsewhere, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, a harrowing documentary on the Indonesian genocide, picked up the grand prix. Veteran Russian film-maker Andrei Konchalovsky won the best director silver lion for The Postman’s White Nights, his semi-improvised portrait of a remote lakeside village, while Kaan Mujdeci’s Turkish dogfight saga won the special jury prize. The acting honours were split between Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver for their collaboration as a married couple in crisis in the domestic drama Hungry Hearts.
Outside the screening rooms, there were lightning flashes and ominous rumbles. Critics claimed this year’s festival provided further evidence that Venice is increasingly lagging behind its rivals Cannes and Toronto, with a line-up that contained few major American titles. However, festival director Alberto Barbera retorted that the event should play a different role - championing ambitious and innovative work from around the world. In the case of Andersson’s extraordinary Pigeon, he managed to snare what was possibly the strangest and most beautiful beast sighted at a festival in years.
