Thirty-three is the supposed age at which Jesus Christ died. Three-three is also the number of scenes in Roy Andersson's latest film About Endlessness, about humanity's inability to find spiritual solace in a world abandoned by God. Make no mistakes, this film is a masterpiece of miserabilism, a film thankfully made by Andersson just prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, since it takes the man many years to make his finely controlled tableau's of pain, suffering, and a little bit of human joy to remind us of what might be. The film definitely feels like a COVID-19 film, because of how the world depicted within is fractured from itself, lonely and isolated whether at home or in public spaces. This is a film where social distancing seems the norm. Like all of his feature films since 2000 (Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence), About Endlessness is as rigidly controlled as a set of babushka dolls. Andersson owns a sound studio which he uses to shoot all his films, allowing him total control of every formal element, literally painting his world in very restricted, lifeless, dull colors. Similar in its hyper control to Austrian experimental filmmaker Gustav Deutsch’s only feature film, Shirley-Visions of Reality (2013). In this case the chosen color palette is dusty grey. Characters in his films move very deliberately and individualized characters are made up in "white face", as if they stepped on a 50 pound bag of white flour. The exception to this make-up regime are young characters, who seem immune to this lifeless apparel. The life-sucking makeup is reserved for people middle-age and older.

Stylistically Andersson is one of a kind, an auteur in the old fashioned sense. When I need to describe Andersson to someone who has never seen his work, I resort to the easy gambit of incongruous comparison that film critics often fall back on: Andersson is what happens when you blend the seriousness of Ingrid Bergman (his Swedish compatriot), with the comic style of Jacques Tati (and his social satire), with the comic absurdity of Monty Python. New to this film is the presence of a female voice-over who narrates the action of scenes either just before we see them, during, or after. Maybe to remind us, like those long-winded silent cinema inter-titles which would tell us complete actions before seeing them, that Andersson is not interested in traditional narrative suspense or urgency. You are DEFINITELY in the wrong theatre for that!

Andersson shoots his scenes largely in static, long shot, long takes, with black frames interceding between each new scene (there is one scene with camera movement). There are a few recurring characters and some continuity between scenes. The narrative time is mainly "sometime now", but also injects non-linear jumps in history, like scenes that take us back to Nazi Germany or Siberia. What follows is a scene by scene impressionist account of Andersson's flight (in some cases quite literally) of irreverent, absurdist reality tinged fantasy.

Scene 1) The Credits: Man (and Woman) Can Fly

A couple are flying above in the clouds, like a Marc Chagall painting, like birds, freedom, woman's voice choir, celestial.

black frames, credits, black after every scene

Scene 2) The Birds Are Above

Another couple are seated on a park bench, their backs to camera, static, birds flying ("September") ahead in a “V” formation. The image recalls the first flying couple and introduces the motif of humans striving for something beyond the everyday.

Scene 3) The Haggard Looking Man

A tired looking man walks slowly up the subway stairs, hands filled with shopping bags. Addressing no one in particular (the camera? Someone off-screen?) he complains about a chance encounter with a high school friend who did not acknowledge him. He wonders what he did to be treated so rudely.

The street location (a set, as is everything) is a dusty grey, sky overcast, sets, no camera movement.

Scene 4) Unruly Waiter

A man is seated in an empty restaurant table reading the paper, oblivious to the old waiter about to serve him wine. This world is grey and white and solemn. Waiter opens the bottle, smells the cork….twice before waiting for the patron’s approval. He then overfills the man’s glass before proceeding to repeatedly soak up the spilled wine with a drenched towel. The customer looks on with surprise and disgust. This scene invokes Jacques Tati’s love of the rude waiter from Les Vacancies de Mr Hulot and Playtime.

Scene 5) Woman at Window

A woman dressed in business attire stands back to the camera looking out from her grand office window. She turns to look at something offscreen camera left before turning back. The window seems a substitute for a television set playing a documentary on dull cityscapes.

Scene 6) Bedroom

A rotund middle-aged man (Andersson’s preferred age for his characters) walks into his bedroom and checks to see if there is any money under his mattress. A female voice over explains, “I saw a man who did not trust banks. So he kept his savings in his mattress.”

Scene 7) Modern Day Christ

A winding narrow city street, flanked by onlookers. A man in a grey suit and thorns around his head struggles as he carries a heavy wooden cross, with followers who yell at him, whip him, kick him, abuse him. Onlookers watch. Christ died at age 33 apparently. This poor man looks much older. One of the longer scenes in the film.

Scene 8) A Nightmare

A dark bedroom, with a couple sleeping. The man, a priest, wakes up from a nightmare in cold sweat. He tells his wife, “They drove nails through my hands.” This explains the bizarre previous scene. He sips water and goes back to sleep.

Scene 9) A Young Lady and Her Plants

A young woman waters a plant outside her store, incessantly. A young interested man walks past her. He stops at the next door bookstore, an excuse to make eye contact. The woman walks back into the store. The plant is matched by two smaller plants inside the store. They form the only sign of nature in the drab city corner. In the far background a bicycle rests on the wall, an echo of De Sicca’s classic The Bicycle Thieves. The same woman’s voice opines on the man’s sorry state of romance”  "I saw a man who has not yet found love.”

Scene 10) Science and Religion

The same man from scenes 7 and 8 visits a doctor. Science meets religion. This is the most outwardly comical and existential scene in the film. By this film’s standards, verbose. A dour, flat version of Ingmar Bergman. The two men are framed in long shot across a desk situated in front of a window. The priest confesses to the doctor he has lost faith and is tormented by nightmares. “I do not believe in God. God why have you abandoned me?” Doctor: “Could it be, maybe that God does not exist!” Priest: “No, that would be horrible!” Doctor gives him common sense and a wakeup call to the practical reality of his services: “Maybe be content you are alive….See you next week. I do not work for nothing. Neither do you I imagine?”

Scene 11) Busker

A legless subway busker plays and Italian mandolin, “Oh Sole Mio.” The VO explains the context: “I saw a man who stepped on a landmine and lost his legs.” A single man next to the busker’s wheelchair watches on. Life can surely be cruel.

Scene 12) The Baby

A family is standing outside the stairs of a monolithic building. A bank perhaps. A young couple with their grandmother; the man plays with the baby while grannie takes photos. Off to the side is an old fashioned baby carriage, the type seen in the Terry Gilliam animations in Monty Python. At times like this I am tempted to describe Andersson’s style as Ingmar Bergman by way of Monty Python and Jacques Tati.

Scene 13) The Drunk Priest

We are back with the faithless priest, in his parish. The camera frames him in his antechamber with his flock framed through the church door, waiting for mass. "God why have you abandoned me?" The priest prepares the host, while takings swigs of wine from the golden chalice. He walks into the church and serves his flock, with the chalice he drank from, and then drunkenly stumbles off frame.

Scene 14) A Son’s Grave

A dreary day. A husband and wife put flowers on their son's grave, Tommy. They talk to him.

Scene 15) Above Cologne

A grand extreme long shot city scape of Cologne. Angelic voices sing while the Chagall-esque couple fly overhead. A rare panning shot to the left to frame Notre Dame church, lost in the heavy fog: "I saw a couple in love flying over a city known for its beauty now in ruins."

Scene 16) Train Station

We are at a train station. The diagonal angle and distance of the camera to the train suggests a gentle homage to the famous Lumiere brothers train movie that startled audiences in 1895. People are exiting the trains, people are waiting. A final passenger, a woman carrying a plaid suitcase exits and is left alone on the platform. Waiting. The train leaves the station, leaving her a forlorn figure. A man finally arrives to accompany her. As the train leaves it reveals the city background. Perhaps more than any other sequence shot, this one exposes the artificiality of Andersson’s production style geared toward finite control that can only come when each location is a carefully constructed set.

Scene 17) Blues Music

We are in a bar, blues music playing, Billie Holiday singing “All of Me.” A couple are seated. Other patrons are reflected in the huge wall mirror behind the couple. The man pours a glass of champagne for the lady. She takes a few long, slow sips and seems to love the bubbly drink. Which is confirmed by the voice-over.

Scene 18) Lonely Lady

As the blues singing slowly fades we cut to perhaps another section of the same bar, a lady sitting alone at a table, another man eating alone in the corner. A second man cautiously enters the bar holding flowers, asking the lonely woman if she is “Lisa Larsson.” “No I am not”, she replies. Finally her partner arrives carrying two pints. The flower man leaves the bar. A long fade to black.

Scene 19) The Prisoner

We are in the desert. In the middle of the frame is a wooden stake, an open coffin resting to the side. Three helmeted military men enter the frame right with a prisoner, and tie him to the stake. A priest joins them. The man cries and pleads with them for his life. The men take no heed of his calls and leave the frame as they came.

Scene 20) A Happy Moment

Joy! Three young woman walking along a country road come across a café, where people are seated on the terrace eating. Jaunty music is heard from the café radio. The three attractive women begin to spontaneously dance and sing along to the music. The patrons watch, and clap, overwhelmed that joy can still be had in this world. At three and a half minutes this is one of the longer scenes in the film.

Scene 21) Broken Shoe

We are at another train station. A man is seated on a bench reading the newspaper. A lady with a baby carriage is dealing with a broken heel. No one seems able or willing to help her. She sits next to the man, mildly interested in her broken heeled shoe. She removes the shoes and places them on the bottom of her carriage and leaves, walking barefoot along the train station floor.

Scene 22) Honor Death

The previous silly scene is followed by an awful tragedy. A man is lying on the floor of his living room with his dead, bloodied daughter resting on him. He is crying profusely, as are a couple standing next to him at the door frame. The man holds a knife in his right hand. The voice-over tells us, “I saw a man who wanted to protect his family’s honor…and changed his mind.”  This is as close to political as Andersson gets.

Scene 23) Fish market

Comedy of social manners, comedy of embarrassment. The fish market is an interesting choice of location since his actors look like dead fish with their sullen complexion. We see a lady buying fresh fish. Everyone looks on as the butcher flays the fish. A couple behind the lady start into an argument that gets physical. The large man slaps the woman hard across the face, the sound of the slap resonating like the sound of the mother slapping the boy on the train platform in the opening scene of Tati’s Les Vacances de M. Hulot. Two more hard slaps follow before onlookers decide to take action, dragging the assaultive man to the ground. The fallen man professes his love for the woman he has slapped. A strange way to show your love. Everyone has forgotten about the fish.

Scene 24) The Science Book

A brother and sister (or young couple) are seated across from each other in a small bedroom. A telescope is set by an open window. The brother reads from a science book about the laws of thermodynamics and hints at the film's theme: "Nothing can be destroyed. It is endless. It can only change from one form to another." The girl combs her hair while the boy explains the meaning of life to her. Andersson like many great humorists likes to play on the comedy of the incongruous, pitting the important (meaning of the universe) with the mundane (combing one’s hair).

Scene 25) Hitler’s Bunker

As Andersson is sometimes wont to do, he interjects an historical dramatization that serves as a flashback of sorts. Here we return to the end of WW2, in Hitler's bunker, the final days of Hitler, who we see enter the room, which is in a state of disrepair, chair toppled, off-screen sounds of bombs dropping. Crumbling ceiling. How does this exactly relate to the rest of the film?

Scene 26) The Sad Traveler

As factual and historical as the previous scene was, this one has no sense of internal meaning as to the psychological causes on display. We are inside a crowded train waiting to leave from the station. A man seated in the front cries uncontrollably, and wonders, "I don't know what I want," to the people around him. They are as clueless as the audience, and in fact, much like the man reading a newspaper in scene 21, have no idea why the man is crying. Andersson often plants these audience surrogate characters in his scenes. One of these men seems particularly disturbed by the crying and speaks out, “Poor Bastard.” A woman replies, “You’re not allowed to be sad anymore?” To which the man responds, “Of course, but why doesn’t he be sad at home instead. Why here?” In the modern age we don’t take well to be inconvenienced.

Scene 27) Raining on her Birthday

Even the weather is sad in an Andersson film. A man and his young daughter are caught in a heavy downpour in the middle of park, on the way to her birthday party. Life is also made up of these little moments.

Scene 28) The Faithless Priest

The same priest returns a week early for his next appointment at the doctor’s drab, grey office. The priest stands at the door and asks the poor secretary “What must I do now that I have lost faith?” Good question. But the secretary is more concerned with her work hours, reminding him they are about to close. Dr. Lindh joins them with his coat half on, not in any mood to field existential questions and is concerned that he may miss his bus. Another indication of the comedy of the incongruous, pitting the important (loss of faith) with the mundane (I need to catch my bus). The world can be uncaring when two such opposing forces are put into play.

Scene 29) Bad Day at the Office

Professionals are not spared their share of human suffering, or human foibles in Andersson’s films. A man is in a dentist chair and presents a problem for the dentist. The patient has a toothache but yells in pain each time the dentist touches the tooth, but refuses anesthesia because of his fear of needles. What is the dentist to do when the man yells in pain each time the dentist tries to work on the tooth. The dentist eventually just leaves in frustration. His hygienist tells him the doctor is in a bad mood, he has problems.

Scene 30) Drowning his problems

In a rare case of connecting scenes, we cut to bar, where we see the dentist seated at the bar with a drink! The patrons stand looking out of the storefront at the falling snow. One man claims “how fantastic it is? “What?” “Everything.” Silent night is playing.

Scene 31) Military

A military troupe marches through a cold, wintry setting, while religious music plays. The voice-over intone, "I saw a conquered army walking toward the prisoners camp in Siberia."

Scene 32) The Haggard Man Returns

The haggard man from scene 3 returns, standing outside his kitchen, his wife seated behind him. He continues to lament his absent friend Sverker Olssen who refused to acknowledge him. Now we get the reason for his overt sensitivity: the man holds resentful feelings over his friend's PhD, while he claims to have done nothing with his life. His wife trying to console him, chimes in, that he visited Niagara Falls and Pisa Tower and Eiffel tower….to which he replies, “He probably did too.”

Scene 33) Stranded

The film ends with the most forlorn of liminal spaces. A man stands outside his broken down car, stranded on the edge of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Andersson has taken us here and left us stranded by the road with this man. Birds are chirping. The same choir hymn music adds a celestial feel to an otherwise sad image. Andersson loves to place people in liminal spaces. People at train stations, bus depots, subway platforms, elevators, stairs, long winding roads, anywhere they can be filmed waiting, wasting precious time. For Andersson liminal space epitomizes the absurdity of the modern age. No matter how technologically advanced we get people always spend oodles of time waiting. Liminal space also represents humanity rudderless with no direction. If a priest has lost faith, what chance do we have?

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Essays   absurdism   comedy   roy andersson   swedish cinema