Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
Andersson’s bleakly hilarious examination of quotidian grotesqueries
Country: Sweden
Director: Roy Andersson
Time: 1 hour and 34 minutes
Where Can I Get It: YouTube (free); Criterion (free w/subscription)
What It Evokes: Absurdities of human existence, the weirdness of everyday life, intricate compositions
Songs from the Second Floor opens with a naked man lying inside a tanning machine, only his protruding feet visible to the viewer. Beside him stands Pelle, who has been charged with firing employees at their company, in a suit and tie. The man bathed in ultraviolet light is Pelle’s boss. His deadpan, disembodied voice echoes from within the tanning machine: “You’re not pleased, I hear?” Pelle remarks on how uncomfortable the firings have made him. “Everything has its day,” his boss replies. “The pyramids had their day... The steam engine had its day.” By implication, their company’s workers had a good run as well.
Structured by forty-six (very) loosely connected vignettes, Roy Andersson’s bleakly hilarious masterpiece centers on different Swedish characters confronted by scenarios that underscore the oddities of modern existence: Pelle and those he renders redundant; Kalle, a furniture salesman whose store has burned down (possibly by his own hand) and whose son has gone insane after writing too much poetry; a magician whose most recent trick has gone horribly wrong; an economic advisor to the Swedish government looking for a lost report that may or may not say people don’t actually have to work quite as hard. Across each of these vignettes, Andersson’s unique visual aesthetic leverages extremely intricate set designs to surface the grotesque and uncanny within the quotidian, painting a comically dark picture that explores forms of violence, arbitrariness, and anomie haunting contemporary existence. As one character puts it, “It’s hard being human.” The bleak has rarely been so funny and the funny rarely so bleak.
There is nothing quite like a Roy Andersson film. His work features singularly complex shot composition and production design—think Bergman’s intimate obsessions channeled through Jaques Tati’s carefully crafted sets. Scenes feature static cameras, bracing wide-shots, shadow-less lighting, detailed designs (in bespoke studio settings), extended and highly choreographed takes, and limited color palettes (whites, creams, ivories, beiges, browns—accented by characters wearing make-up designed to give them a ghostly pallor). Within the vignettes, frontally positioned individuals almost never make eye contact with one another. Crowds are often found in the frame’s background (viewers to the unseemly, mirroring the film’s other viewers of the unseemly), which evoke forms of group portraiture more common to canvas than the moving image.
Indeed, this group portraiture highlights the long-since naturalized (but in fact deeply artificial) societal mores dominating urban life. (For a few of the film’s scenes, Andersson built a train station instead of shooting in an existing one, in effect turning reality into artifice: a comment both upon film and contemporary lived experience.) Like the best satire, Songs from the Second Floor exaggerates and heightens the trivial weirdness of the everyday in order to underscore its exoticism. The arbitrary reigns in a world (seemingly) absent meaning. Structures (quite literally) determine situations. Within these confines, Andersson’s characters are almost always old, overweight, and overly made-up: this is a depiction of life absent its colors, verve, and youth—though not absent a certain form of humanity. And it’s wickedly, uncomfortably, memorably funny.
Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Andersson has moonlighted as one of Sweden’s premier directors of television advertisements—money from his commercial studio has long financed his films, which given their intricate mis-en-scène and ornamentation often require sizable budgets and extended shooting schedules. Indeed, Songs from the Second Floor’s vignettes borrow from the contemporary commercial in their speedy delivery of information and detail-rich studio settings, as well as their reliance upon an (often humorous) central conceit and archetypal characters. These “abstracted depictions of daily life” (in Andersson’s own words) present a commercial-like gloss through which the uncanny continually punctures: What if the characters in commercials weren’t actually all that happy? What if the latest widgets didn’t, in fact, bring all that much joy to the family? What if we all just dropped the pretense?
Andersson’s extended shots and grand sets almost always become claustrophobic—their shiny facade giving way to a creeping sense of voyeurism as we linger on characters stuck within inescapable confines (an inexplicable traffic jam functions a recurring motif throughout the film). In contrast to this constructed artifice, his many non-professional actors employ a deeply “naturalistic” acting style—here the debt remains explicitly to De Sica and the Italian neo-realists, who in their own way leveraged artifice to depict “reality” through cinema. The juxtaposition between this style of acting and the deliberate settings remains stark and jarring, underwriting much of the work’s humor. These are “real” people in unreal spaces, which they can neither control, nor inhabit comfortably.
Throughout, Songs from the Second Floor’s single takes and static camerawork encourage close viewing, through which the film’s compositional complexities become visible over the duration of its shots. The eye begins to wanders around the picture frame, locating details overlooked during an initial focus on foregrounded characters. Aspects of the arrangement (particularly crowds in the background) emerge and begin to impede on scenes, generating additional layers of meaning through a merger of discrete compositional elements—these are remarkable, biting, uncanny assemblages.
Andersson’s work has been deeply influential for many filmmakers both in Sweden, where his fingerprints are all over Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014) and Triangle of Sadness (2022), and internationally—in a thoughtful Criterion interview, the American horror director Ari Aster (Hereditary, Beau is Afraid) discusses Andersson’s lasting impact on his own work. Andersson’s involved mis-en-scène possesses real similarities to the work of Wes Anderson (avant la lettre)—though his films lacks Wes Anderson’s engagement with sentimentality and melodrama. Throughout his works, Andersson’s rich insights on the oddness of human existence arrive in visually stunning compositions that remain deeply memorable and eerie. There’s nothing quite like it in cinema, and the lessons his films embody continue to remain worthy of consideration.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Roy Andersson — World Of Glory (1991)
Roy Andersson — A Pigeon Sat On A Branch (2014)