About Endlessness

 From it's first shot, Roy Andersson's About Endlessness (2019) suffocates viewers in its uniquely melancholy decor and fantastically studied compositions.  Andersson's icy, vacant style somehow contrives to have his tableaux seem empty even when the image swarms with people.  His mise-en-scene makes Wes Anderson's twee symmetry and diagrammatic lighting seem haphazard and careless by contrast.  The degree of tyrannical control exercised by the director is astounding and, I suppose, ultimately confounds the viewer.  Andersson's films have a distinctive appearance, based, I think, on the dead-pan aesthetic of top-of-the-line European advertising -- it's unsophisticated for a product or service to make a direct appeal to consumers; therefore, austere staging and enigmatic characters suggest, albeit only faintly, certain needs and desires that the thing advertised can assuage.  Andersson's peculiar style is all about suggesting obliquely (or sometimes with shattering immediacy) that human beings desire comforts that can never be satisfied:  in one respect, About Endlessness, revolves around a constellation of needs that can't exactly be even defined.  His airless compositions, pinning figures in diorama-like settings that are, at once, totally realistic and completely stylized, are maps to the endlessness of desires and urges that can't even be clearly articulated and that devolve into sterile ecstasies of anxiety and despair.  About Endlessness completes a tetralogy of films beginning with Songs from Second Floor, You the Living, and A Pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on Existence, movies with similar texture and subject matter made between 2000 and 2014.  All of these movies are designed as a procession of sequence shots, one incident per scene, shot tableaux style (using the ancient fixed camera and theatrical staging of early silent films such as those by Jacques Feuilliade) -- in most cases the sequence shots don't form a narrative with adjacent material.  The movies cut from scene to scene by an associative logic with each sequence making its point and, then, ending in a black-out.  (The effect is eerie and reminds me of the disquiet I felt watching Ernie Kovacs' skits on TV when I was a little boy -- Kovacs scared the hell out of me:  as with Andersson's films, there was a lonely, confined aspect to his comedy that was more grim than funny.)  Andersson's pictures are only vaguely thematic.  They don't cohere into any particular message or theme.  Components of the films match their titles, but, generally, we have the sense that the movies consist of wry ideas that Andersson thought amusing or significant strung together without any real continuity.  On Endlessness seems more cruel and grim than his earlier films -- it has far fewer gags and some sequences tilt toward an almost unbearable sorrow.

The scenes are all shot in a studio -- even his large exterior shots, seem to be manipulated to give the effect that we are gazing into a monochrome terrarium.  The color scheme in On Endlessness is astonishing uniform:  all shots are composed in tones of slate grey, pale blues with an icy aspect, various shades of brown and beige.  Skies when we see them are universally overcast and underlit.  There are shadows, no highlights, and no scintillation in any of the images.  A shocking flare of blood on a woman's chest in an anecdote about honor-killing (seemingly committed by staid Swedes) is the brightest thing in the movie.  With one discreet exception, Andersson's camera never moves and remains fixed.  Sets are constructed with meticulous, miniaturist and obsessive detail, but don't ever seem overcrowded.  Andersson has many different ways to stage motion in his claustrophobic sets -- people enter or leave and we see action through open doors and mirrors.  With a few exceptions his locations are cheerless bars (uniformly lit like specimens under a microscope), cold-looking apartments, city streets that tunnel through interminable, identical blocks of stone buildings, mostly unfurnished offices and waiting rooms.  In one scene staged in a church, Andersson focuses on a utilitarian sacristy in the foreground with a glimpse of a sanctuary behind where some people are kneeling -- churches normally are lavish settings but Andersson films this location to avoid indulging in any spectacle. The characters have the greenish chalky pallor of slightly decomposed corpses -- most of Andersson's figures are zombie-like old men and woman. Ultimately every scene looks like glimpse into some sort of prison cell.  

The film commences with an oddly foreshortened view of a couple embracing in the midst of a sea of fog. Then, we see a man and woman, both turned from the camera looking from a park bench on a hilltop over a valley filled with grim-looking identical apartments.  After the preliminary shot, most, but not all scenes, are introduced with a voice-over in which a woman says "I saw a man who..." or "a couple" or, in one scene, "an army".  The voice-over sometimes announces things about the figures on screen that we couldn't discern from the scene itself.  For instance, one shot shows a woman in what seems to be a business office looking out a window:  "I saw a woman incapable of shame..." the voice-over tells us.  But the woman, who is dressed professionally, barely moves and for the 40 seconds of the shot never turns to face us -- she's staring out a window.  We see an elderly waiter pouring red wine all over a white table-cloth in a posh if empty, restaurant.  His customer barely glances up at him.  A man emerging at the top of stairs in a Stockholm courtyard (he's carrying bags of groceries) stops to address the camera -- the man says that he has seen an old schoolmate that he once "seriously harmed" who has refused to speak with him.  The schoolmate, then, trudges up the same steps and rushes by the man without acknowledging his increasingly desperate cries.  The voice-over utters a non sequitur:  "I saw a man who had bought groceries to make an elaborate dinner for his wife..." Toward the end of the film, this disconsolate character appears again, at home with his wife in an adjacent room:  he addresses us with a monologue about how this fellow who refuses to respond to his greetings has probably had a far better life that him/  Something is boiling furiously in a pot -- possibly the rage and resentment of the speaker.  His wife responds that this is nonsense:  after all, they've been to Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  A man dreams that he is being forced to carry an immense heavy cross, scourged mercilessly as he staggers up a city street.  A crowd cries "Crucify him!"  In one of the film's few instances of continuity, the character awakes in bed, recounting his dream to his wife.  This man is a pastor of some sort.  He goes to see a therapist, a hulking old man who says he can help him but that it will cost a lot of money.  The therapist makes an appointment for a week in advance. Later, we see the priest at his church in the sacristy, guzzling communion wine before going into the next room to administer the sacraments. The priest says that he has lost his faith.  In another later sequence, the priest appears at his therapist's office crying that he has lost his faith.  But he's come too late and the therapist and his chubby receptionist literally throw him out of the office -- they have a bus to catch.  No one can help anyone else.  A man with a bad tooth goes to dentist but refuses anesthesia (he's afraid of needles).  Every time the dentist starts drilling, the man wails piteously.  Finally, the dentist gets up and stomps out of the office.  The nurse says that "the doctor is having a bad day."  In the next shot, we see the dentist drinking morosely in a bar while snow falls outside, a single Christmas ornament glinting mournfully in the window.  We hear "Silent Night" and a man says that "it's all fantastic" although he's ignored by the others in the tavern.  A legless man plays mandolin in a subway station.  The music leaks outdoors where a grandmother is obsessively taking photographs of her son's small baby.  A man and his little daughter are going to a birthday party but they are caught in a terrible downpour.  A train arrives at a desolate open station where a woman and little girl are waiting.  People get off the train including the little girl's father whom she joyfully greets -- but the scene is not about that family; an attractive young woman gets off the train with her suitcase.  No one is waiting for her. She sits down sadly.  Then, we hear steps and a man comes running across the train platform.  Obviously, he's late.  '"Yoo-hoo," he says to the woman who gets up to leave with him, obviously miffed, and unwilling to say a word.  Most of the scenes are gloomy, even despairing but there are a couple of less mournful scenes, most notably three girls who walk by a cafe where music is playing on a jukebox.  (It's Benny Andersson's jaunty Ror vig mig mu, an Abba-styled tune.)  The girls dance and, when the song ends, the isolates in the cafe all clap for them.  Much of the film is quite dire:  A prisoner is tied to a post apparently awaiting a firing squad while he begs and the sea roars behind him.  At a fish market, a man slaps a woman repeatedly and, then, gets thrown to the ground by the other zombie-like customers.  When they let him up, he tries to strangle the woman, all the while saying that he loves her while she replies:  "Yes, I know."  In a bunker collapsing under shells and bombardment three Nazi generals stare comatosely at the plaster falling from the ceiling (one of the men may already be dead).  Hitler enters and the still conscious generals listlessly salute him "Sieg Heil!"  There's an honor killing with a father cradling  his daughter whom he has just knifed to death while neighboring tenants in the apartment building look on numbly.  An enormous army marches across the steppes toward a Siberian prison camp -- these scene which goes on for a long time probably imparts the title to the film.  A man embracing a woman like figures in Chagall painting float over a bombed-out city -- it's probably Dresden. Periodically, we hear an aria by Bellini from Norma but, in a bizarre turn, the credits tell us that the opera sequence was recorded when Marilyn Horne appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.  An earnest young man tells his girlfriend about thermodynamics and says that we are just "energy" -- but neither of them move at all and they day outside looks grim and lightless.  A man's car has failed on a little lane on an endless brown moor.  Try as he might, he can't get the car to start.  

Most of the film is inconsequential, although the elaborate sets and careful camera angles create the impression of a great, granitic significance in each scene.  On Endlessness feels like a series of unhappy jokes with the punch-lines omitted.  The movie is fascinating but very mournful.  Roy Andersson is now 78 and this may be his last film -- ultimately, he is remaking the works of Ingmar Bergman although as a series of repressed, cruel vignettes.  Bergman had lost his faith, but, at least, he believed in narrative.  Andersson has lost that belief.