Just that title alone would get it into every year-end list going, but Roy Andersson’s sublime, baffling, utterly beguiling parable is one-of-a-kind cinema of the highest order. Filmgoers familiar with his earlier work, Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living – released in 2000 and 2007 respectively – will know something of what to expect: fixed camera positions, middle-aged men moving ponderously through miserably surreal tableaux, a bilious yellow-green pallor drenching everything, humour deadpan to the point of sclerosis.
But this does scant justice to the “Beckettian loneliness and hyperreal drabness” – as Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw described it – that Andersson somehow conjures up; in fact, this is the poetry of the misshapen, the uncertain, and the ignored. Andersson sets up a series of (mostly) disconnected scenes, offering one episode after another of increasingly flamboyant desperation, criss-crossed occasionally by interconnected characters. A couple of the scenes have already become famous: one, where an anachronistic cavalry squadron – supposedly led by Sweden’s King Charles XII – takes over a modern-day cafe; and another, where a barkeep called “Limping Lotta” leads her customers in a slow, formal song and dance to the tune of John Brown’s Body.
Andersson says himself the film was inspired by the birds in Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow, and that’s as good an explanation as any of the extraordinary parade of imagery that he has come up with. (It’s instructive also to compare Andersson’s feature films with his prolific commercials output.) The tone of the film grows increasingly dark as it moves on; a departure, for sure, from the empathetic humiliations that dominate the first two parts of this Andersson trilogy. The director has some angry things to say about exploitation: there’s a particularly awful scene involving a monkey experiment which I was relieved to find out was accomplished with a very realistic looking puppet. For a film so apparently committed to observation, detachment and, yes, reflection, it’s an unexpected development.
Pigeon may not go on to win much on the awards circuit (though it did unexpectedly carry off the Golden Lion at Venice in 2014), but its unreplicatable oddness and imagist verve should ensure it will be remembered when other, more apparently palatable films, fall by the wayside. It really is something special.
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