[critical] A PIGEON PERCHED ON A BRANCH PHILOSOPHISED ABOUT The EXISTENCE

R

etour affairs for the Swedish director Roy Andersson after 7 years of absence and We, the living, noticed in the un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year. And what kind of return since it won the best film award, the Golden Lion, at Venice in 2014 with A PIGEON PERCH ON A BRANCH PHILOSOPHISED ABOUT The EXISTENCE, title extension, which falls purely in the cinematic style of the Swedish.

For those who do not know the director, this young man of 72 years is one of the geniuses of cinema absurd contemporary. His style, recognizable, and many times copied but never equaled, is a mixture of burlesque and absurd situations, greyish filmed in wide shot and fixed without any cutting of fitting. These films function by the process of a large patchwork of scenes and not necessarily a relationship narrative between them to form throughout the film a kind of comic book where each bubble tells a story within a fixed framework, like a table, animated way. Roy Andersson has a long career as director of advertising all the more hilarious one than the other. Ingmar Bergman called it ” largest producer of advertising films in the world “. That is to say, if the man is a master of the art of the dot video.

For a well-informed public, this last film of a trilogy, 15 years after We, the living, and the oldest and award-winning in Cannes in 2000 by the Award of the Jury, Songs from the second floor, means the reunion happy with a single formalism, always hilarious and morbid, but that, on the time of the film gives way to perplexity. Same pattern on these old movies, we are captivated by the atmosphere and the incongruity of the situations, the laughs are nervous in the face of this black humour, nordic, then you get used to it and finally one begins to look at his watch. The question of time and of rhythm is symptomatic in Andersson, it excels on the short distance but it insists to take its course. It’s disconcerting but, at the same time, here lies the leg of Roy Andersson, bring to life characters in an incongruous situation in real time as if the viewer was watching these people through a window.

By contrast, for a public which is new, the shock may be brutal and frontal. The frames fixed worked on such paintings, the author does not hide his fascination with the painters Otto Dix and Georg Scholz, the characters blafards moving while phlegm and slowness, the small musical ridicule as a leitmotiv and finally, this reflection on the human, its condition, and this is not its futility, may both confuse, attract, excite, but never leave you indifferent.

“That one loves or that one does not love, the gesture is there, powerful, intriguing, awfully strange.”

In sum, Roy Andersson is a player, with this film, he is a player, because it still leaves the viewer between two chairs, between two silences, between the two scenes as to let him go in his thoughts. Thus, the pigeon perched on its branch is perhaps not the one we would believe…

But, definitely, this film is further proof that the artists of the 7th art can propose alternative extraordinary in the way of telling stories and we make them live. Whether you love or not love, the gesture is there, powerful, intriguing, awfully strange and it is surely this gesture that has been justly rewarded in Venice. Bravo !

The other outputs of the April 29, 2015

BITCH – the MOVIE, THE BLIND, A PIGEON PERCHED ON A BRANCH PHILOSOPHISED ABOUT The EXISTENCE, The ESCAPED: IN PURSUIT Of ANNIE BROWN, THE LABYRINTH OF SILENCE, OUIJA, THE TOURNAMENT, THE BIG LEBOWSKI (exited), OUR WOMEN, OPTIMISTS, etc