Xan Brooks 

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence review – Roy Andersson’s glorious metaphysical burlesque

Xan Brooks: The eccentric Swedish director of Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living returns with a brilliantly distinctive film that no one else could have made
  
  

Still from A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
A film that contains multitudes … A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence Photograph: PR

Two salesmen visit the city of Gothenberg, dragging a suitcase of samples from one door to the next. Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nisse Vestblom) trade in novelty items. Their case contains vampire fangs and laughter bags and a latex mask of “Uncle One-Tooth”, which so spooks a customer that she runs away screaming. “We want to help people have fun,” the salesmen explain, again and again, but their manner is so doleful they could be officiating at funerals. Watching their bumbling progress, we don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The film team review A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

The salesmen, let’s say, play tour guides through Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, a glorious metaphysical burlesque that screens in competition at Venice. It’s a film that picks up the baton from the director’s earlier Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living. It is “the final part of a trilogy about what it means to be a human being”. Let’s say that I loved it. Pigeon’s a lugubrious joy; nobody else could have made it. But it’s a film that contains multitudes; it’s a cat’s cradle of mysteries. I can no more make sense of this movie than I can explain my own life.

As Jonathan and Sam move from one shop to the next, their path crisscrosses that of the film’s other inhabitants. We shift from the blank, passive limbo of “Limping Lotta’s bar” to a nearby cafe that may just as well be its cousin (it certainly boasts the same decor). This cafe, it transpires, is perched near the frontline of Charles XII’s campaign against the Russians, so that the patrons stare out the window at the surging advances and limping retreats of 18th-century cavalry. The Battle Hymn of the Republic plays as a refrain, and yet the king can’t use the cafe toilet (the door is locked; it’s occupied). Somewhere along the way, Sam is knocked down by a cyclist, while Jonathan is suffering a crisis of faith. When the suitcase bursts open, the laughter bags erupt in an ensemble hollow chuckle at the salesmen’s sorry fate.

What a bold, beguiling and utterly unclassifiable director Andersson is. He thinks life is a comedy and feels it’s a tragedy, and is able to wrestle these conflicting impulses into a gorgeous, deadpan deadlock. I love his use of coloured filters, which bathe the tale in an unearthly glow of drab creams and greens, as if we are watching the drama inside an aquarium. I also like the way he keeps his camera static and his tableaux framed in mid-shot from a constant 10-foot remove; his protagonists bobbing and drifting like placid manatees. These people are near enough to study yet not near enough to touch, and maybe that’s the intention. Maybe Andersson is saying that 10 feet is as close as we get to our fellow human beings.

Poor Jonathan and Sam, they are made to stand in for us all. The salesmen are in search of a shop called Party, but the address doesn’t exist, and so they are lost in the suburbs, picking their way through a rum, rueful hell that might really be heaven. When the credits roll we must leave them there. Time marches on; we have our own shops to find.

The cinema doors are flung open and the delegates totter out into the daylight. They look faintly drunken and shell-shocked, barely beginning to process the things they’ve just seen. This, I’m guessing, is a fairly common response to a Roy Andersson picture. The director comes to town on a mission. He possesses a big box of magic; he wants to help people have fun.

Roy Andersson interview: ‘I’m trying to show what it’s like to be human’

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*