Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson hasn’t grown any sunnier in the last 20 years. After three features tragicomically chronicling life’s cruelty and banality—2000’s Songs from the Second Floor, 2007’s You, the Living, and 2014’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence—Andersson is back with About Endlessness. It’s another astounding assemblage of dryly humorous, immaculately designed, fixed-camera vignettes, if an even more morose collection than the previous ones.
About Endlessness opens with one of Andersson’s most bravura images: a couple floating, in embrace, through a sky dominated by gray, ominous clouds. Accompanying them is a solemn choral piece that’s of a very different tone than that of the instrument his movies previously employed: the tuba. The vignettes that follow have moments of levity and dry humor—from a waiter who distractedly pours wine into an overflowing glass to a trio of young women who giddily dance at a roadside cafe to The Delta Rhythm Boys’ “Tre Trallande Jantor”—but overall this is a somber, almost defeated work. (Notably, one scene depicts a literally defeated army being marched through the snow to a prisoner-of-war camp.) Indeed, if it wasn’t for that dance number, I’d probably leave About Endlessness feeling like one of its few recurring characters, a tortured priest (Martin Serner) who wanders through various scenarios, crying, “What should I do now that I’ve lost my faith!?”
Many of the vignettes feature a first for Andersson: voiceover narration, which describes something about the character at hand (“I saw a man…”). At first I thought this voice might be that of the floating woman from the opening shot—an angelic observer along the lines of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire—but then the airborne couple reappears, this time floating over a vast model of devastated, post-war Cologne, and we hear the voice again: “I saw a couple floating above a city.” Whoever is speaking seems to be a stand-in for the camera’s POV, for on occasion someone will look directly into the camera, as if in response to the voice, and plead their existential case.
But is anybody listening? The movie suggests not. Yet if there is no spiritual solace to be found, it’s unlikely any of the pallid, corpse-like characters in About Endlessness would take comfort from a doctor’s advice to the priest’s predicament: “Maybe be content with being alive.” Being alive in About Endlessness is drudgery at best, torture at worst—without even a tuba to keep you bemusedly bouncing along.
