Customer Reviews

You the Living

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This film is made up of 55 shots, most of which represent a discrete narrative element. Connections do occur, the most evident of which is the dream recounted by the man in the first scene, which connects to the final five shots of the film.

But there are stories, here, too--if the axiom that "character is story" holds true. There is Mia, who considers the withholding of alcohol a form a sadism, and who complains that nobody understands her; she recurs in four vignettes. Similarly, the film checks in occasionally with Anna, a groupie of a musician for "The Black Devils"; she extrapolates a single instance of kindness from the musician into an agony of unrequited love. There are other characters, in agonies of their own.

A psychiatrist addresses the camera: "People demand...to be happy, at the same time they are egocentric, selfish and ungenerous. They are quite simply mean, most of them." Vignette after vignette, that is what we see, the meanness of people. That is what unifies these diverse pieces of film. Whatever kindness we see is superficial.

But there is one other thing: there is the occasional sing-along. That is ordinary life, the film says. A stream of human meanness interrupted from time-to-time by a bit of music. All of this moves with dark humor toward a man-made apocalypse.

In Ancient Greece, Lethe was one of the rivers of Hades, the river of forgetfulness. YOU, THE LIVING opens with a quote from Goethe: "Be pleased then, you living one, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot." It puts us on notice that the dreariness we are about to witness is all there is: "be pleased". Maybe, as the psychiatrist suggests, we should just stop whining, try to be a little kinder, join in the sing-alongs and enjoy the simple things.

YOU, THE LIVING and Andersson's earlier SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR coalesce styles of filmmaking suggested by earlier directors, but is a thing all its own. It deserves viewing, it deserves study. It deserves imitation.

why do they look up? is it fear of destruction, or hope of salvation? or just another distraction? do we have to choose? what difference does it make to us, the living?

a woman sits on a park bench, railing at her boyfriend to leave her alone, to take the dog with him, existence is too painful, there's no point of it all. when he mentions the roast that his mother may be cooking, she says she may stop by later, and breaks into a sad but upbeat song about the motorcycle she wishes she could afford.

a young woman narrates a dream in a bar. in her dream, she marries the local rockstar; as he plays and she opens wedding presents, their apartment building pulls into the local trainstation, where they are greeted warmly and congratulated by a crowd. the crowd bursts into a cheerful song, and the young groom accompanies them with his crooning electric guitar as the building moves on down the line to unknown destinations.

music, rather than a continuous storyline, is what holds together this delightfully dark and downbeat hilarious existential comedy. a series of moments, minor tragedies, the boring or mundane or obnoxious components of everyday life, the nightmares and dreams, all loosely connected by location and the occasional recurrence of overlapping elements. but there is a rhythm. tension builds and subsides. one story plays against another. a sound in one scene provides the clue to the next. when someone tells a story, all turn to look, all move in unison. a kind of dance. a symphony of human misery that happens also to be quite funny.

for those stuck on the lack of a story, think of this like an album, whose continuity is in rhythms and harmonies and atmosphere rather than a conventional narrative arc. check it out if you like inventive cinema; this looks great, a muted tone beauty, is thoughtful and inventive throughout, and unpredictably funny. nearly as good as it gets.

The absurd look at everyday life in this beautifully crafted film is so heartwarming and gleeful we are eagerly awaiting a US DVD release! I hope it becomes available. I would love to own his movie in order to show it to all of my friends and family. It is just stunning and delightful.

Did you ever rent a film from Netflix and be so enchanted that you went right out and bought a copy? Well, that's what happened to me with this film. It's funny, it's touching, it's beautifully made and it holds-up to repeated watchings. It's the kind of film that I drag out to show to my friends -- and every single one of them has since purchased their OWN copy!

Before beginning, I'd like to make it clear that the director (Roy Andersson) intends this as the second part of a trilogy, with the equally eye-popping Songs from the Second Floor, as the first installment. Second, I don't consider this film to be a comedy, not even a black comedy. I mention this because, if you are expecting a comedy, don't. If this is funny at all, it's a peculiar kind (see below). The "Monty Python" bit from the cover is totally misleading, even if one considers the absurdist side of Python. This is a much colder thing than Python would ever undertake.

And now for something completely different ...

Is this a disc that needs to be owned, or will renting it be sufficient? The quality of the picture is not the best viewed close up, losing some of the crispness of the director's details, while the soundtrack makes no special demands on the Dolby 5.1. Extras include a full-length commentary by the director, which I've chosen not to listen to after hearing his commentary for Songs from the Second Floor, a director interview, two "making of" features, and a selection of clips from the director's previous four movies. In all these are approximately an hour. If you've seen Songs from the Second Floor, these extras are almost a formulaic repetition as for that film. So in brief, if you like to show off Andersson films to friends, you might want to own this, or, you might be like me, and just rent it again. Now the movie itself.

Roy Andersson has made most of his career in TV commercials--often quirky ones--and that approach is his style here, writ large. Everything you see was filmed on a sound stage and was built from scratch. Everything is meticulously placed, and almost nothing ever goes to waste visually. Because the camera never moves (except on very, very rare occasions), it gives a viewer plenty of time to check out the space, to appreciate the depths of each shot, to admire the colors, to notice things you might not notice if the camera was moving. Aesthetically (and thus, as a film experience) it's virtually unrivaled and a real treat.

But also, I think Roy Andersson has ripped a bitter page out of Bergman--I've heard his work described as Bergman meets Gilliam--this is not accurate. So you know, this film consists of fifty scenes or so, all barely over a minute. Sometimes they connect together in a sequence, and there are recurring figures, but the idea of a plot per se is so attenuated that it feels like there isn't one. Even though the film is fairly short, I found myself becoming antsy about when the ending would be--not because I wanted it to be over, but just because I lost the thread of significance that was holding the scenes together.

I first saw this movie at a festival with lots of people and a panel of talking heads afterward. One of the main things that kept coming up was how the movie was generally funny (the introducer said this was the only comedy that could legitimately follow Pink Floyd's The Wall), but that at some point there would be an image or a scene of such pathos that it caught different viewers wholly off-guard.

I will go out on a limb and say that the movie derives it's humor at the expense of those filmed. For instance, a fat, dumpy man takes a huge bouquet of flowers to a woman's house, and she slams the door in his face, catching the flowers in the door. An odd, striking moment that might well make one laugh--because one is otherwise at a loss what to feel. But then later, we see the ugly, dumpy little man again (cast by Andersson because he is pathetic, dumpy, and ugly) suddenly giving out these restrained half-sobs of rejection. Funny?

WARNING: This paragraph has spoilers (although there's not really a plot to spoil.) At the very least, one can accuse Andersson of setting up his viewers. If we laugh because the imagery startles us, either Andersson is laughing abusively with us, or he's looking down his nose in general. The film opens with a man starting awake and announcing that he had a nightmare about bombers flying over the city. In the closing sequence of the film, everything stops in the city as people look up, as if expecting something beatific. Cut to bombers, and the clear implication that the city is going to be destroyed. After all that everyone has been through in the film, they will be obliterated by bombers. That's Andersson's vision.

In other words, I don't find that this is a comedy, not even a black comedy. It is a film about Schadenfreude, that marvelously astute German word, "joy at the suffering of others." For many, their lives are so crushed by the rat race, the struggle to survive, the grim realities of modern Western life, that seeing others suffer may seem funny, or at least cathartic. I don't know if Andersson means to accuse us (Those, the living) for laughing, or if he is laughing along with us. And I think as well that his Schadenfreude is undermined by the very fact of making a movie. That he would undertake to make a movie at all is a gesture to overcome the misery of the human condition, to answer Bergman's and Kirkegaard's relentless grimness, which was similarly transcended by film and philosophy, respectively.

In other words, if it was really as hopeless as Andersson wants us to believe, then he wouldn't have made the film at all. In a sense, he is the anti-Fellini. Fellini depicted the parade of human faces, but he did so affectionately or at least with fascination. Andersson is much more judgmental about it. But while this is thoroughly obnoxious, the visionary quality of his films overcomes this. It's as if I really enjoy watching him do what he does, but I'm not too appreciative of what he has to say along the way. This was very true of the completely trite commentary he had for Songs from the Second Floor; it was as if he didn't understand his own movie. Or did I not? A. O. Scott says that the movie is "a deadpan but nonetheless heartfelt affirmation of human existence, which may be fragile and pointless but is still worth something." Heartfelt? I think absolutely not. I would say this can be read out of the film from the overly sentimental (compensatory) attention paid to a lovelorn groupie, and to the obviously witty and farcical trial scene (which is a dream sequence). The movie is currently listed (as of 15 June 2010) as #12 on the Japanese horror Top 10, for goodness sake.

Anyway, enough of this. This film is astonishingly, strikingly visual. It has a capacity to visually surprise unequaled by any film I can think of (that aims for surprise) except Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodoworsky. And doubtless, part of what I like about this film arises from the same embittered place that I also dislike about it, but I still highly recommend this.

If you love your cinema a bit different, edgy, odd, sparse, and pushing the envelope on what would be considered a film; You The Living is a perfect film. I loved this film; it took me completely by surprise.

You The Living is a strange slow moving film from Sweden about...well that's hard to explain exactly. The film is a series vignettes surrounding roughly a dozen characters, that do not know each other. The scenes are basic and stark. The camera rarely moves. Each shot, or time between cuts in the film, is very long by most film standards (some are many minutes). There isn't very much dialog. But the film is powerful and at times funny. This is much like Sweden, a gorgeous, deep, warm country that doesn't flash bright lights on itself - think Ikea, simple, functional, pleasant design.

The cover art has a quote from Uncut - 'Monty Python meets Ingmar Bergman...'. The Monty Python side, well that is not exactly very accurate, this is not anywhere near that funny. But the brilliant part of the quote is Ingmar Bergman comparison, and not just because Bergman and Roy Andersson (director of You The Living) are both Swedish. No this cuts much deeper. Bergman's films are very complex and on purpose almost impossible to understand. Bergman was interested in feelings, how a viewer responded to his films. The story could be impossibly complicated with many layers, but in the end he cared about what the viewer felt and his reaction to his films. This is where I find a parallel to You The Living. Andersson is brilliant at moving the viewer's eye around the screen. Just as a scene appears to be boring and it is time to move on to something else (most directors would have cut to a different scene 20 or 30 seconds earlier), something new arrives gradually into the frame, focusing our attention on that new thing. In a slow subtle way, Andersson has moved our thoughts from one thing, on to another, then another, and we forget where we started. But in the end there's an emotion and strong feeling about these scenes, and we never knew he was driving us there.

Everything is carefully calculated, but looks random. The film opens with a man saying he dreamt about bombers flying overhead, there is a slightly stylized swastika tattoo on the man in the next vignette, there are two swastikas underneath the table cloth in a later vignette (in fact the actor draws attention to them by trying to reassemble a broken terrine), and the film closes with bombers (they look a lot like World War II bombers) flying over a city, possibly Stockholm. The director has very quietly subtly talked about the connection of Sweden and Germany in World War II, but he never hit anyone over the head with his personal views.

Tartan, along with IFC, FilmMovements, and Strand, is one of the elite few companies delivering remarkable independent film from around the world. Tartan has delivered a unique wonderful film with You The Living.

The film is presented in Swedish with English subtitles that can be turned off. At an hour and thirty five minutes, it is exactly the right length. The film is not rated, and would probably end up with a mature rating in the US. There is a short scene of a couple having sex, so there is a bit of brief female nudity. Otherwise, there is no violence, or no strong language.

This is a bizarre film. It is not for everyone. I happened to really love this film. I was amazed to see how the director moved my eye around the screen, how small things became important, and how I felt after watching this film. For the lover of cinema, this is a fabulous film.

I enjoyed You, the Living(Du levande), 2007, 90-minute long collection of 50 short vignettes so much that I've re-watched the whole movie as soon as I finished it and I keep coming back to some of my favorite sketches over again. I highly recommend the film to the fans of truly original, defying classification and definitions independent movies that mix in perfect proportion tragedy and comedy while explore the different aspects of modern human existence. In his less than 90 minutes long movie, Swedish director-writer Roy Andersson attempted to look closely at all humankind while not leaving for a moment a rather gloomy rainy Stockholm and its unremarkable, often miserable and complaining, depressed and misunderstood, inhabitants. Their lives can be described as disharmony in the faded gray, green and beige, the palette that Andersson has chosen for the film which creates the atmosphere of quiet desperation and misery. The dreams and reality of the characters substitute each other effortlessly. It seems that three of the greatest filmmakers from the past, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieslowski, might have inspired Anderson to make this extraordinary film, because their impact is difficult to deny. With all the existential subjects and non-sentimental outlook, You the Living manages to be very funny, funding humor, poignancy and tenderness in the absurd situations beneath the minimalistic style and remoteness. As always in a movie with great deal of intertwined short stories, some were more memorable than the others. For me, the funniest was the sex scene -it has to be seen to believe. The best, most memorable, gentlest, the most optimistic in the pessimistic world, perfectly constructed, with the best cinematic surprise and the most beautiful music was a dream sequence told by Anna, the young girl desperately in love with a rock musician Micke Larsson (Eric Bäckman ("Cat Casino", a guitarist for Deathstars). This miniature has become one of my favorite film scenes ever.

The choice of music in You the Living is fascinating and adds so much to the film appeal. The best scenes (or are they just my favorite?) are filled with music: Louisiana Brass Band playing Mozart Lullaby which sounded like a marching tune and made me smile. The woman in a bathtub singing beautifully the old Russian folk song Odnozvuchno gremit kolokol'chik /Monotonously Rings the Bell that was popular in many European countries by the different titles. Actually, this short, less than one minute long scene seems one of very few depicting happy people, a singing woman in the bathtub and a man who dresses in the room and sings along with her. When people are happy, they often sing, just for themselves. When they are not happy, they also sing, and there is a hilarious motorcycle song in the beginning of the film performed by one of the funniest characters, a middle aged lady, wannabe biker, and the embodiment of annoyance and nagging. I already mentioned the Anna's dream sequence that I watch every day and can't get enough of. Comparing to faded and for the lack of the better word muted colors, the music is lively, expressive and catchy. This contrast works very well for the film.

You The Living is the second film in the reflection on existence trilogy that consists of Songs from the Second Floor (which is on the top of my Netflix queue right now) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence which Roy Andersson still works on, and hopefully it will be released in 2013. I am very happy to have discovered and experienced You the Living, truly unique work of the great modern film creator and eagerly look forward to seeing the rest of the trilogy.

One review describes Roy Andersson's recent films as `Ingmar Bergman meets Monty Python', and that's about right.

A surreal series of thematically vaguely connected vignettes, almost all shot in beautifully composed single long take.

Some are howlingly funny, a few quite heartbreaking. A few are less interesting. And while there's no obvious story,

like a Laurie Anderson concert it all adds up to a bigger whole; a satire of the modern world, it's disconnection, desperation

and confusion.

Andersson's use of washed out color to create a disconcerting visual tone is unlike anybody else's.

While his terrific 'Songs From the Second Floor' got a little more attention, I found this a tad more cohesive, funny,

sad, and visually amazing.

This is a rarity, in that it's a film by Roy Andersson, one of Sweden's least known, sporadic, but brilliant filmmakers. I stumbled on his films completely by accident. I was watching Ebert and Roeper one night, and they reviewed Songs from the Second Floor. The scenes they showed from it were fascinating and reminded me of Fellini's work. So when the film finally came to my city, I was mesmerised by it. Seven years later, Andersson followed it up with another brilliant work, You The Living.

Andersson has made his living directing some of the most unique, hysterical, and brilliant commercials ever made. I usually hate commercials, but in Andersson's case he makes it an art form. He's only made four feature films, A Swedish Love Story, Gilliap (which I was lucky enough to see recently at a retrospective of his work at Museum of Modern Art in NYC. It's the rarest of his films and was a huge flop in Sweden. Its poor box office performance precluded Roy from making another film for 25 YEARS), Songs from the Second Floor, and now You The Living. This film is as good as his others, filled with memorable scenes. There's the scene with a melodramatic woman who is constantly having nervous breakdowns over little things like not serving good alcohol at dinner (and singing about them), the adventures of a tuba player in a dixieland brass band, a man doing the legendary "pull the tablecloth" trick and not being particularly succesful, and a "wedding" scene that is both deeply sad and touching at the same time.

Even though Andersson makes a film at a pace that rivals Kubrick and James Cameron, the wait is worth it, as he's a phenomenal filmmaker and probably the best filmmaker in Sweden now. You The Living is a beguiling, lovely, sad, hysterical film that gets deeper every time you see it.

You The Living is an enjoyable, highly intelligent surrealist piece. Each frame is uniquely created by the master, Roy Andersson. The voices he reaches us with are all unique and powerful. Still, the first work of his new style "Songs From The Second Floor" is a cut above.

Again, this film You The Living is a wonderful work of art. Roy Andersson not only has an incredible vision and the masterful skills to bring those visions to life, but he also has something to say (something missing today). He has an extremely powerful voice to go with everything he has given us in this amazing offering. This DVD has special features with sample sets. It is quite amazing how he directs some highly amazing effects. This is a worthy addition to any real film collection. Please see Songs From The Second Floor First.. Be ready for the third installment "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence".