About Endlessness (Preview)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Produced by Pernilla Sandström and Johan Carlsson; directed by Roy Andersson; screenplay by Roy Andersson; cinema­tography by Gergely Pálos; set design by Anders Hellström, Frida E. Elmström, and Nicklas Nilsson; costume design by Julia Tegström, Isabel Sjöstrand, Sandra Parment, and Amanda Ribrant; starring Martin Serner, Jessica Louthander, Tatiana Delaunay, Anders Hellström, Jan Eje Ferling, Bengt Bergius, and Thore Flygel. Color, Swedish dialogue with English subtitles, 76 min. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Anyone hoping that, on the completion of his “Living Trilogy” in 2014, Roy Andersson would adopt a radically new stylistic direction or engage with a radically new fictional world is in for a disappointment. About Endlessness finds Roy up to his old tricks—tricks that have served him well for over forty years in advertisements, shorts, and, since 2000, feature films. A series of meticulously staged scenes are filmed in long shots and long takes with a static camera. Humans, solitary even in company, are as apparently devoid of humanity as the image is drained by digital technology of color. The settings are transitional public spaces or bare private spaces as anonymous as hotel rooms. Discrete scenes are structured like gags without the punchlines (such structures make it easy to remember many individual scenes from Andersson’s work, but not always which film they came from). About Endlessness could be the title of every Andersson film of the last twenty years, as deadpan characters wait endlessly in a purgatorial or dystopian landscape. 

But that’s not entirely fair. There are some cosmetic—even cosmic—changes to the usual Andersson schtick. About Endlessness opens in darkness with sacred choral music playing, as it does at several points throughout. The film’s title emerges from what had appeared to be stars in a night sky. A couple, in a motif inspired by the fabulist folk paintings of Marc Chagall, float through a smoke-filled sky—as they will later over a panorama of Cologne lying in ruins after the air raids of World War II. It is as if Andersson is trying to foist some redemptive metaphysics on his familiar materialist world.

The film also shows a greater interest in narration within and across scenes, and greater attention to the relation between sound and image. The deceptively peaceful first postcredits tableau shows a couple lounging on a park bench overlooking Stockholm. We can hear the sound of the wind through the trees, but none of the foliage in the image is moving. A female narrator uses the same formula throughout—“I see something…”—to tell us what we, too, can see, and sometimes have already seen, in a technique of apparent redundancy. A man addresses the audience to narrate an incident from his recent past—an old schoolmate ignores his greeting in the street—while in the same space and time the incident is restaged for us. Andersson’s frames emphasize strong perspective lines, traditionally suggestive of rationality and a fixed stable viewing position, but here producing grids that imprison their human occupants, dehumanizing unwelcome but necessary human activities such as eating, drinking, or screaming. If you look carefully at each image, it is actually violently unstable, the lines of sight spilling out in various directions.

Often there is no movement at all in Andersson’s cinema, as characters sit or stand about as if frozen, endlessly watching but unable or refusing to act. Like viewers in the cinema who can only look on helplessly at the pain paraded on screen—the punctuating addresses directly to camera implicate us, as well as the intervening camera. This is most evident in an already celebrated sequence that is arguably the greatest and most galvanizing in Andersson’s otherwise downbeat cinema. At an inn by the side of a gently rising country lane, a vintage Swedish vocal group plays on an off-screen jukebox. Patrons sit silently outside in the beer garden nursing their drinks or linger at the doorway. A trio of young women emerge from the top left of the screen, walking their bicycles. The sound and sight of Life amid the silent immobility—in both this scene and within the film as a whole—is bracing. As the women reach the inn, the music amplifies. They stop in front of the unresponsive gathering and begin to dance to the music, attempting, specifically, to attract some young men out front, and more generally, to rouse the living dead. Their bodies are loose and abandoned in a world where individuals’ pain is revealed in their crushed, bent, stiff postures. Each woman dances in her own style, but always in unison with her friends. The effect is only slightly dissipated by the nonreaction of the inn’s customers—it is impossible to tell in the wide shot whether they are bored, embarrassed, or moved. Perhaps, like this captive moviegoer, they want to jump, join in the dancing, and whoop with relief but are condemned to their role as observers. At the end, like all audience members, they can only stay at their seats and applaud, but hopefully they, too, have been momentarily invigorated…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 4