Songs From The Second Floor

If you like the films of Aki Kaurismaki then Songs From The Second Floor should appeal.  If you don’t, then you could be struggling as writer-director Roy Andersson makes the Finnish director look like a merry prankster.

Andersson’s film is a series of elegantly-composed minimalist vignettes which depict an inert dystopian world in which quietly desperate souls act out an absurd drama, an impotent charade, unsurprisingly, given the shared religious inheritance, reminiscent of Bergman but rendered in largely visual terms. There is a loose unifying narrative axis in the story of Kalle (Lars Nordh), an overweight furniture retailer who has burnt down his store in order to collect the insurance money and periodically visits his son who has  “gone nuts” from writing poetry and has been confined to a mental institution, but interspersed with this are seemingly unconnected tableaux composed as if in static frames, the whole thing united by using an exquisitely muted but literally colourless palette of whites, greys and browns.

The film received a special prize from the Canes jury and in purely aesthetic terms it deserves it. The problem is that what initially charms as mordantly deadpan humour begins to wear thin by half-time, the point (which is, sort of, “Beloved is he who sits down”) having been made, and one starts to become restive as more or less similar scenes repeat themselves.

Acknowledging Hollywood conditioning, either some of the scenes (notably a blindfolded young girl who is executed by a group of burghers and churchmen for apparently asking for too much from life along with its Boschean aftermath) could have been omitted or some kind of narrative permutation developed. Or perhaps that’s simply a misplaced expectation from someone not imbued with Calvinistic dismay with this repugnantly tawdry pageant called life.

Songs From The Second Floor is an impressively distinctive film but whether it is more than a single joke played cleverly over and over (Andersson is a leading director of TV commercials so perhaps this has accustomed him to the short run format) is another matter.

 

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