Greatness can’t be rushed, and that’s exemplified by Roy Andersson, who spent 14 years slowly unveiling his “Living trilogy”: “Songs From The Second Floor” (2000), “You, The Living” (2007) and “A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence” (2014). But with his 74th birthday approaching in March, the filmmaker is speeding up his process. Slightly.
Screen Daily reports that on January 2, 2017 Andersson will start shooting the fourth film in the “trilogy” which is going by the working title of “On Endlessness” (alternate potential names include (“On Inexhaustibility,” “On Infinity” and “The Inexhaustibility Of The Human Condition“). The director’s films aren’t neatly summarized stories, and his approach of connected vignettes will continue here.
“It’s a little timeless, but connects to our time and past time,” he told the trade, adding that some sequences will be set in World War II, including one involving Hitler in his bunker (“who had a dream to conquer the world but failed”). Others will include: a couple “floating over both misery and happiness”; “a defeated army leaving the city they wanted to conquer now going to become prisoners of the enemy”; “three ladies singing a very happy song because they love to be alive”; “a man getting lost wandering into the wrong café”; “an injured veteran playing a mandolin in a metro station”; and “a divorce prosecutor who doesn’t trust banks and keeps his savings under his mattress.”
The production and post-production will be intensive, with Andersson building sets for each segment, tearing it down, and then starting on the next one, and the film is not due to be finished until April 2019. That of course just happens to be one month before the Cannes Film Festival, and you can make your own assumptions in that regard. Still, a new film from Andersson is on the way, and this time, we just have to wait five years instead of seven. We’ll take it.