The Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson took the top prize at Venice, the Golden Lion, five years ago with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. His new movie, About Endlessness, consists of some 30 or so vignettes, a few linked across the film (a priest who loses his faith, a man snubbed by a more successful school-friend) but mostly disconnected. It’s Scheherazade for miserabilists.
In the pouring rain, in a bleak field, a man gets soaked when he kneels to tie his little daughter’s shoe. A dentist becomes exasperated with a patient who won’t have a local anaesthetic. A waiter deliberately pours a bottle of wine over a diner’s table. A defeated army marches off to Siberia. In the final bunker, Nazis wearily salute Hitler.
All are filmed with an entirely static camera and no edits (save one, in which a loving couple float through the sky over the ruins of a city, perhaps Dresden, the camera panning so slowly that you have to keep checking it’s moving). The actors are hangdog and largely immobile too, the lighting dull and shadowless.
A voiceover captions many of the scenes in a repetitive formula borrowed from Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain (“I saw a young man who had not found love”, etc).
Ridiculous! Yet it’s strangely revealing how little enhancement cinema needs, how powerful such minimalism can be in revealing human perplexity. It’s probably not one for Netflix, though.
