worldly pessimism in lazy fragments

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WE CAN AVOID

Among the most infuriating films, those which strive to deliver final sentences on the inanity of the human species certainly hold the upper hand. From this squeaky overhang, Swedish director Roy Andersson, 78, has made a specialty of himself, with his cinema of tableaux vivants where the characters, claimed by Otto Dix but above all worthy of the Grévin Museum, struggle like puppets with the absurdity of their condition. His last feature film For eternity, Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, presents a series of sketches, between innocuous and decisive moments, which refer to the same horizon of existential helplessness.

A priest announcing to his doctor that he has lost his faith, a man shouting in a bus not knowing what he wants, a stunned waiter letting a glass of wine overflow, Hitler seized in his bunker when defeat promises to be inevitable , a woman slapped by her husband in the middle of the market, a prisoner on the verge of being executed or a column of prisoners of war on their way to Siberia… Here are some fragments of which the film is composed in as many wide shots, opening up in as many unusual genre scenes.

Of all the work of Roy Andersson, who has his followers, this sixth feature film is undoubtedly the laziest. Drowned in the gray, peopled with embalmed figures, the film aligns vignettes that nothing connects except the depressive atmosphere and the profession of despair. Never will this Cioran for Dummies have so clearly revealed its advertising reflexes: the plan is only valid as a formula concluding with a fall or a pontificating aphorism. There is only one scene to save: the one, more radiant, more open, where three young women start dancing on a country road, under the eyes of a few dazed onlookers. Apart from that, nothing new in the dismal plain of worldly pessimism.