You, The Living

‘Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed,
before Lethe’s ice-cold wave licks your escaping foot.’ 

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies, 1790

From Goethe’s cautionary prelude unspools Roy Andersson’s Du levande (You, The Living, 2007), an atomised dollhouse of brief, grim sketches on urban malaise. The poem’s tidal threat begs a kind of aletheia, an un-forgetting of mortality. We find ourselves tiptoed and slightly askew, peering into microcosmic tableaux of city living; slackly glued together and awash in sunless hues of bleach and mildew. In a café, a man’s wallet is pickpocketed as he laughs on the phone. On a park bench, a drunk woman laments her loneliness. Amid jubilee celebrations, a man takes a desperate call from his debt-ridden son. Andersson’s assorted characters each stagger on the tip of Lethe’s wet tongue:¹ their afflictions persist at the intersection of an excruciating awareness of their own wretchedness, and a total oblivion to their own part in its making. The film’s dialogue serves as an ironic and revelatory gesture toward this stasis. The laughter in the café punctuates a lengthy boast of wealth. The woman on the bench screams at her family to leave her alone. Reluctant promises balloon at the jubilee, beneath swirls of fanfare and chatter: yes, more money, soon. Suspended thus in-between, they elude death as forewarned by the epigraph, but so relinquish any chance at a life anew. These barely living are lucky, and blighted. 

You, The Living is aptly situated at the midpoint of Andersson’s Living trilogy, bookended by Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000) and En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014). The first Living instalment concluded the filmmaker’s 25-year-long hiatus following the critical and commercial failure of his second feature, Giliap (1975). A meandering contrail of a film, Gilliap’s drift along a hotel waiter’s unmoored existence was spurned by audiences as frustrating in form, with a narrative faithless to the neo-noir genre it rippled against. In the wake of this reception, Andersson withdrew from feature filmmaking for over two decades and devoted himself to commercial work. He would later acknowledge the criticisms of Giliap, attributing its flaws largely to his inability to maintain artistic control due to production constraints.² Crucially, his creation of over 400 advertisements during the hiatus financially facilitated his establishment of Studio 24 in 1981,³ the Stockholm-based independent film production company and studio which would go on to function as the exclusive hub and set for all Living films. 

The greater creative autonomy that the studio afforded Andersson was most distinctly realised by an emergent allegiance to the filmic tableau; a zealous embrace, perhaps, of what Alexandre Astruc famously critiqued as cinema’s “tyranny of the visual.”⁴ Wide-angle, frontal and often static, the tableau shot prioritises the onscreen image by way of elaborate and meticulous mise-en-scène; producing a painterly container which appears, in the words of Béla Balázs, as an “insulated space, manifesting itself as a microcosm.”⁵ Following a tentative foray into its use in an early post-hiatus short, Härlig är Jorden (World of Glory, 1991), Andersson’s Living trilogy delineates a stylistic commitment. Each film presents a series of tragicomic tableaux as stilled fragments of the quotidian, strung along a shared thematic repertoire traversing social alienation, existential dread and the banality of suffering. Narratively, each vignette hovers alone – save for an occasional tangling of connective threads through the recurrence of particular locations and characters. This is notably pronounced in You, The Living, which foregrounds the repetition of its tavern setting as a localising motif for its individual panoramas. Bathed in chalky grey-blues, the venue is a Hammershøian chessboard of slowly moving patrons, all of whom maintain a tacit measure of distance from one another. It also holds a fittingly binary narrative function as a kind of threshold space; for the characters, the tavern is either a consolatory visit on the heels of misadventure, or the teleological birthplace of the inciting incident. A drink for the drunk, who has finally fled the park bench. A drink for Anna, who will be heartbroken by a rock star sat two tables away. Each guest is en route to or from unhappiness, and uncaring for others’ travels. The bartender rings a bell for last orders: “Tomorrow is another day!” It is a comforting platitude to those sufficiently stricken by today, and a threat to the unwitting.

My twice viewings of the film have been somewhat overcast with regret at my sleek and thin mode of spectatorship. On my laptop, its digital trompe l’oeils are portable and replayable; these paintings are mine to hold and keep, I have hung them on my wall. Andersson has oft spoken of painter Pieter Bruegel’s influence in his staging of depth toward a construction of “complex images” – densely legible scenes, shot with a fixed camera and teeming with detail. The film’s expansive tableaux accordingly demand deciphering and recognition; of familiar countenances in public places, of sight gags through distant windows. The Living films have been described by Andersson as “painfully intense” sites of observation: “the experience lingers, one cannot leave it behind.”⁶ Yet it feels like a trick against tricks, to plough my sticky gaze across the compact screen, to press rewind: I have caught you out. By mobile viewing I can all too readily thwart duration, and disturb the affective phosphorescence. It does, however, yield a more forceful exchange between viewer and image. Characters directly address the spectator throughout the film, often rendered via “dorsal-cum-frontal staging”⁷ – initially filmed from behind, they turn to deliver their asides only upon registering the observational presence of the camera. Andersson’s frames are consistently angled partway within a space, situating the viewer before an oblique cross-sectional view. The result suggests a kind of hidden dimension; the monologuing character seems to look beyond the camera and viewer, into the plenitude of their surrounds. As the living speak, I am to imaginatively extend the pro-filmic composition. Siphoned into the shrunken screen, I am giant. My body turns (into) the corner, constructing the unseen space which I spread across. 

The characters, too, mobilise fantasy as an essential supplement to the tedium of reality. Nightmare or reverie, dreams offer a welcome displacement. There is in You, The Living a preoccupation with movement and speed; agents of change. A businessman hurls racist insults at the chatty barber, agitated that he is running late. A spell of rain finds characters immobilised under the brief shelter of various non-places: bus terminals, public bathrooms and apartment lobbies. A tradesman’s car inches down a congested street as he relates a recent nightmare: his attempt at a tablecloth party trick led to his execution by electric chair. But even this dream carries hope, in its swiftness of upheaval. Hélène Cixous considers dreaming as a crossing of frontiers without transition; at the stroke of a signifier, there occurs a “cancellation of opposition between inside and outside… there is no explanation: any would destroy the magic.”⁸ The dreamer finds themself in the dream without enduring a passage. Love of the dream is founded upon the allure of this immediate entrance, the instant rupture – a reminder of one’s proximity to change. In the tavern, Anna reveals that she has been jilted by Micke, the rock star. But she has also had a dream. We journey to the afternoon of their wedding day: the new bride and groom idle in an ivory kitchen. As Micke picks a soft ballad on the guitar, the house begins to move as a train carriage, bound for the honeymoon. The city tumbles past their window, before clusters of beaming faces sprout into view. Admirers have gathered to wish them well: “Anna, Micke, best of luck!” They shout over and over, a happy incantation. Back in reality, the drinkers stare at her blankly. “It was nice,” she murmurs into the camera. 

In the closing episodes, all gazes turn upward to a flock of strategic bombers speckling the sky. The sight evokes another dream, this time belonging to an old man: “I laid myself turned to the wind, like this,” he tells the tavern, saintly with his arms stretched out. “And I flew high, high up. Up there, I waved to mum and dad. They waved back.” The film’s final scene is the first bereft of human presence. Andersson perches us on the wing of an incoming plane; the approaching city appears as patchy carpet. The old man dreams commonly: to be robust and free, for the gift of onward movement. The old man dreams of the abstracted plane. The yet living dream-strip the aluminium cadavers down to something fleshly: the bombers lower their heads, they wave back. 

Du levande/You, The Living (2007 Sweden/France/Germany/Denmark/Norway 94 mins)

Prod Co: Studio 24 Prod: Pernilla Sandström Dir, Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: Gustav Danielsson Ed: Anna Märta Waern, Alexandra Strauss Mus: Benny Andersson Prod Des: Magnus Renfors, Elin Segerstedt

Cast: Elisabet Helander, Jugge Nohall, Jan Wikblad, Björn Englund, Birgitta Persson, Lennart Eriksson, Jessika Lundberg, Eric Bäckman, Rolf Engström, Jessica Nilsson, Pär Fredriksson, Leif Larsson, Patrik Edgren, Gunnar Ivarsson, Waldemar Nowak, Håkan Angser, Ollie Olson, Kemal Sener, Bengt C.W. Carlsson

Endnotes