Iconoclastic Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson (“Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence,” “You, The Living, Songs from the Second Floor”) has been long considered among the world’s top filmmakers, but he’s not the most prolific (just six films and two shorts in five decades). Andersson’s latest — and by credible accounts, the last — film, the bleakly, blackly comic “About Endlessness” (Om det oändliga), justly won Andersson the Silver Lion prize for Direction at the Venice International Film Festival in 2019— the first for a Swedish filmmaker—but it’s been a long, circuitous, possibly-pandemic-related delay in receiving the movie in North America.
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Waiting for Anderson and his singular, carefully curated oeuvre to unfold a new offering has always been an exercise in Beckettian patience, so waiting a little longer ultimately makes little, tangible difference. As usual, Anderson offers a stirring, compelling counter-example to mainstream film, eschewing familiar, conventional character or plot-driven storytelling, mobile camerawork, or traditional editing. Instead, Anderson has deliberately embraced a rigorously minimalist, austere approach: deadpan-inflected, satirical vignettes, one-shot/one-scene camera set-ups, and occasional fade-to-blacks or abrupt cuts to mark the ending of one abstractly connected scene or idea to another, all meticulously planned, filmed, and edited from Anderson’s beloved Stockholm-based soundstage. For Anderson, the studio represents the opportunity to recreate not just an interior state of mine (his) but also a three-dimension recreation of that liminal, limbo-like state.
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With a title intentionally freighted with metaphysical import, “About Endlessness” opens with one of the most upbeat, optimistic images of Anderson’s decades-long career as an independent filmmaker: A couple floating above the clouds, presumably in rapturous escape of whatever place or space they left below. It’s only much later that Anderson returns to the silent couple, showing the ruined, bombed-out world beneath clouds of smoke and ash, suggesting, not for the first time in Anderson’s gently absurdist worldview, that only imaginative flights of fancy (literal here, figurative elsewhere), however temporary, provide a possible antidote to the existential ennui and outright despair that dominates the pale, ghostlike citizens of Anderson’s bleached-out, ground-down world.
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The vignettes that follow and surround the floating, flying couple are typical of Anderson’s work: Washed out, if not exactly colorless, scenes, each one set in a precisely detailed location, including a set of stairs (from nowhere possibly to somewhere), a typical Anderson character, this time a wan, middle-aged man carrying groceries eager to share a story involving a slight from a former classmate, repeated, often for seriocomic effect, by an unseen, female narrator (Jessica Louthander) who wryly, mordantly comments on the human foibles that inescapably slip into her vision. Later, the same man laments to his wife the overwhelming sense of failure and disappointment he feels in himself, a mirror perhaps of Anderson himself (one among many, including an office worker who breaks down on a train, lamenting that he doesn’t know what he wants) recognizing his own mortality and self-doubts about his lasting contributions to film as art.
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If the unnamed staircase man reflects one aspect of Anderson’s personality, thoughts, and ideas, then another, a priest who, in a startling reverse confession to a disinterested psychiatrist, confesses his lack of faith in a Christian God and with it, a complete loss of meaning. Like Peter denying Jesus, the priest returns to “About Endlessness” two more times, each time worse off than the last. Anderson offers the priest and, by extension, himself, little comfort except in the banalities of finding purpose and meaning in the rhythms, rituals, and routines of everyday life, all while offering a pointed reminder that attempting to find meaning in ideology (several scenes involve WWII recreations) like religion, can lead to violence, war, and unimaginable loss. It’s just as fitting then that Anderson leaves his last character, not at a crossroads, but alone on a narrow road extending to infinity, waiting to be saved by AAA or its Swedish, Godot-inspired equivalent. [A-]
“About Endlessness” is available now via Magnolia Pictures.