Songs from the Second Floor, 2000.
Written and Directed by Roy Andersson.
Starring Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson, Bengt C.W. Carlsson, Torbjörn Fahlström, Sten Andersson and Peter Roth.
SYNOPSIS:
One evening, a series of strange events with no apparent logic take their course. A clerk is made redundant; an immigrant is violently attacked; a magician makes a disastrous mess of his routine. One person stands out in this collection of characters – it’s Karl, and his face is covered in ash. He’s just put a match to his furniture store in order to cash in on the insurance. No one gets a wink of sleep that night…
Amidst this year’s eclectic collection of retrospectives, Leeds Film Festival offered audiences an opportunity to view an apparently under-sung modern Swedish classic on the big screen. Writer-director Roy Andersson’s long-awaited A Pigeon sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, currently drawing rave reviews on the festival circuit, is only his third movie since re-entering the filmmaking scene in 2000 with the acclaimed Songs from the Second Floor. Songs was his third overall, after a 25-year absence, and, despite Andersson’s quarter-century exile (following the financial failure of sophomore film Giliap in 1975), the movie is strikingly confident. Is it a blackly comedic great? For some, most certainly; for others, it’ll be a confounding and only fitfully amusing film, but an intermittently brilliant and visually arresting one.
Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece Playtime, with its meticulous detail and maximum utilisation of the full frame, is so obviously an influence on Songs from the Second Floor that even the fashion and décor of Andersson’s film appears to have travelled back in time to the grey and beige of Playtime’s late-60s France. Andersson has a similar appreciation of visual gags as Tati, only his taste is more absurd, and progressively so across this film. Songs begins in the mundane office environment of big-city Sweden and culminates in a dusty wasteland adorned with multiple mini-sculptures of Jesus.
Along the way, we’re met with never-ending traffic jams, buses of commuters that suddenly burst into song and stockbrokers that shuffle through the streets self-flagellating. At a magic show, an aged male volunteer is almost sawn in half for real; a recently-fired employee, clinging desperately to the ankles of his former boss, is dragged down a corridor in his old office block; a man delivering mail is suddenly stabbed out on the street. The unpredictability, always grim, sometimes violent, of this mordant epic sketch show is what renders the film so disturbingly off-centre. Where Tati’s picture was hopeful about humanity overcoming the sterility of encroaching postmodernity, in Andersson’s film the people are overwhelmed by it.
Maybe there’s the change in attitude because Andersson has seen the presciently impassive office culture of Playtime only further realised as the years have passed, but the outlook still makes Songs from the Second Floor – with its sickly, sodium-lit expressionism – harder to get on board with. Whether the film actually works as a comedy comes down to individual taste. For this reviewer, it’s too forceful in its oddness to actually induce much laughter. The meticulous organisation and studied use of the frame contribute to the film’s disconnectedness.
The whole thing feels so crafted, and without the warmth of Tati nor an enduring central character like Monsieur Hulot to side with, it really is easy to lose yourself in the tower block hell Andersson is satirising. Still, Songs is so daring, so distinctive that it poses a radical shift away from the lazy, dialogue-centric comedy we’ve all become accustomed to. It’s because Songs from the Second Floor manages to be so surprising, with its human sacrifices and its casual splashes of nudity, that the bizarre carnival should be sought out. It’s bold, assured and absolutely not for everyone. It’s recommended you at least take the trip to find out where you stand.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★
Brogan Morris – Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the young princes. Follow Brogan on Twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion.
Originally published November 25, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
