You the Living
Tartan Video, $19.93The title of this 2007 Swedish film from cinematic sketch artist Roy Andersson recalls Ayn Rand’s debut novel, We the Living, about post-revolution Russian miserables. Not an altogether off-base allusion, turns out: The sad sacks who people You the Living, in wide ties and dated hair, could easily be mistaken for the anti-chic of the Iron Curtain, hermetically sealed and only alert to pop culture and fashion trends decades too late.
The spiritual prints of Rand are pure speculation, but what the filmmaker explicitly acknowledges in the film’s epigraph is the influence of Goethe: “Be pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping feet.” Translation: Get it while the getting’s good. Hell of an intimation of impending doom, no?
More accurately, You the Living charts an unrelated series of tiny dooms, culminating in one big bang of one (not since Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove has a filmmaker so perfectly married gallows humor to horror). The camera is mostly static and hangs back – a medium shot is about as near to the characters as Andersson allows us. The frame makes a living curio cabinet, as the same depressives (rarely named) address the camera, revealing their ambitions, grievances, and dreams both daylight and nocturnal. “I had a nightmare the bombers were coming,” says one man, startled out of sleep. “Nobody understands me,” barks a woman on a park bench, her attentive lover mere inches away. She threatens suicide, then sends him away, but shouts to his retreating figure that she may be over later for dinner, a veal roast. An unseen banjo and sousaphone start up – half oompah, half Storyville jazz band – and the woman, with bellowing contralto, sings about wanting a motorcycle to take her away from the meaninglessness of her life. The combined effect – the buoyancy of the song, the existential dread of the sentiment – is sublime.
The bleak, comical tableaux continue, and certain refrains emerge: “Nobody understands me.” “Tomorrow is another day.” “Last call.” The denizens of this unnamed Swedish town are slumped, predisposed to defeat, yet weirdly endearing, even as Andersson keeps them spatially and narratively at arm’s length. The secret weapon is the song: Creole music plays throughout, and it provides a sunny sonic uplift, nudging the action a few crucial clicks away from tragedy, toward absurdity.
In an included featurette, Andersson says he chose the music because it expressed the “creativity and vitality” of humans. More of that creativity and vitality are visible in the extras that explore You the Living‘s set construction. The entire film takes place on soundstages, using trompe l’oeil and models from scale to miniature – key to Andersson’s vision of the airless and washed-out world of the working class. Regular people, he calls them, in his fashionable collared shirts and surrounded by a crew that is fresh-faced, hale, even hip. The sight of them punctures the wonderful bubble created around the film. Suddenly, one worries that You the Living‘s doughy, ashen characters are an affectation – a caricature of ordinary people as interpreted by the extraordinary. Consider the pronoun again: You the living. So much for we’re all in this together, huh?
This article appears in February 12 • 2010.
