WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
THE PEOPLE ARE ALL PALE AS MUSHROOMS, BLENDING in with the ashen cityscapes, sterile white rooms, and drab, half-empty restaurants. Stuck in meticulously composed dioramas, they enact miniature comedies and tragedies—sometimes it is hard to say which—filled with deadpan humor and haunting bleakness. We could only be in a Roy Andersson movie, where desperate existential quandaries bump up against the implacably mundane, human suffering is met with blank-faced embarrassment, and even horrors are hushed by elegant framing and the harmony of muted colors.
Andersson’s latest film, About Endlessness, hews to the same idiosyncratic method he established in his previous three features, collectively dubbed the “Living Trilogy.” A series of vignettes, each captured in a single, stationary shot, are linked by recurring motifs and characters but without an overarching plot. Almost every setting is constructed in the studio using painted backdrops, models, and a modicum of digital effects. (Andersson makes his movies at his own production house, Studio 24, in Stockholm.) The actors are pasty-faced and average-looking. Andersson returns often to his favorite settings: cafeterias, bars, offices, bedrooms, and train stations that all suggest the presiding spirit of Edward Hopper. The new film revisits familiar thematic obsessions—World War II, Christianity, public executions or punishments—and these weighty subjects sit cheek by jowl with episodes of banality, absurdity, and pettiness, of tiny breakdowns and modest pleasures. A woman is inconvenienced when the heel breaks off her shoe; a man gripes about the success of a former classmate; a grandmother snaps endless photos of a baby; a psychiatrist turns away a distraught priest who has lost his faith, muttering, “Sorry, but I need to catch my bus.”
In subtle ways, feels tonally distinct from Andersson’s earlier films. The treatment of war, violence, and death is more sorrowful than caustically satirical here, and while there are episodes of
