Those who've seen the first two parts of Andersson's 'Living' trilogy will know what to expect by now, and
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence duly follows the same formula, being a series of loosely linked, blackly comic vignettes where a series of hapless people appear on screen and stay there until some point has been made about the petty nature of human existence. It would be in fact be more apt to call the scenes tableaux, because the camera in each scene is totally static and always set at a distance from the characters, without even the need to pull focus, and the characters too are frequently arranged in positions that are in effect still-lifes. The title of the film is in fact a reference to Bruegel's
Hunters in the Snow, and the similarity in the approaches of the painter and director is blatant even without knowledge of this, even down to understated political subtext in the surreal scenes, such as when an 18th-century army from Swedish history barges into a cafe.
The problem with a succession of still-lifes in the filmic medium, however, is that the end result is just that: Andersson doesn't do cinema, and this may grate against some viewers. The wilfully glacial pace and repetitive mundanity of the dialogue don't help in this either. What he does do, though, is art, and art of quite a unique kind.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment