Life studies

SWEDISH director Roy Andersson has only made four feature films in a career spanning 40 years, but each one has been impressive.

You the Living

You, the Living (Du Levande) (M) 4 stars Limited release SWEDISH director Roy Andersson has only made four feature films in a career spanning 40 years, but each one has been impressive.

His latest, You, the Living, is a serio-comic exploration of the meaning of life, a film without a conventional narrative, but filled with short stories, vignettes, studies of the human character. It opens with a man awaking from a nightmare in which he saw sinister black planes flying low over his city, and as it progresses Andersson introduces a great many ordinary people coping with the vagaries of life.

Some of these stories are humorous in a very black sort of way. A man tells about the terrible punishment meted out to him when he smashed a set of priceless crockery while attempting a party trick. A Muslim hairdresser takes malicious revenge on a racist client. A skinny man, passively submitting to sex with a voluptuous woman, can't stop talking about his pension fund.

You, the Living, which begins with a grim quotation from Goethe, won't be to everyone's taste. It's a comedy, in a way, but the laughs freeze on your face. The inspiration might have been Jacques Tati -- in the distanced approach and the reaction against modernity -- but Andersson's jokes are more serious, even gloomy. Yet the film, shot almost entirely in a Stockholm studio, is extremely beautiful, even painterly, with its pale colours and precisely framed images. Music, too, plays an important part in the scheme of things. One of the most touching episodes involves a skinny groupie and a musician she fancies. She dreams of a wedding night in which their apartment becomes a train carriage: a weird and quite wonderful sequence.

This is a compelling film from an original director whose view of the world may at first seem to be bleak but, in the end, provides hope for the resilience of the human condition. Not to be missed by any serious lover of cinema.