DVD - Songs from the Second Floor

? out of 10

Blessed Be the One Who Sits Down

In a sour, gray city, filled with pale drunken salarymen and parading flagellants, everything goes wrong, pain is laughed at, businesses fail, traffic seizes up and a girl is made into a human sacrifice to save a corporation. Roy Andersson's "Songs From the Second Floor" is a collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.

You have never seen a film like this before. You may not enjoy it but you will not forget it. Andersson is a deadpan Swedish surrealist who has spent the last 25 years making "the best TV commercials in the world" (Ingmar Bergman) and now bites off the hand that fed him, chews it thoughtfully, spits it out and tramples on it. His movie regards modern capitalist society with the detached hilarity of a fanatic saint squatting on his pillar in the desert.

The film opens ironically with a man in a tanning machine--ironic, because all of the other characters will look like they've spent years in sunless caves. It proceeds with a series of set-pieces in which the camera, rarely moving, gazes impassively at scenes of absurdity and despair. A man is fired and clings to the leg of his boss, who marches down a corridor dragging him behind. A magician saws a volunteer in two. Yes. A man with the wrong accent is attacked by a gang. A man burns down his own store and then assures insurance inspectors it was arson, but as they talk we lose interest because outside on the street a parade of flagellants marches past, whipping themselves in time to their march. -- BY ROGER EBERT / November 1, 2002

I am one in the camp of "I didn't like it. And, I've already forgotten about it." Really, I just had no patience for it. Off to watch my beloved Life of Mammals, vol. 2