Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

chaos-rampant You will learn few things about what cinema (and you) can be until you learn to train and practice your perception against the flux of images, and this means to be the still point from which everything else is viewed to be in motion, letting it be what it is as it makes its journey to reach you.This is comic, at first sight, tragic, about modern alienation, failure, ego, compromise, desperation. People die. Lose their pension fund. Lose love. All for no real reason that we see of so just the way life strikes us most days. A gloom because it's all faced dead-on, simply the pain without story-drama that justifies. The same as his previous film except a little lighter even, with actual songs this time.But if you are still long enough, then what? A woman sings in a funeral about a next world without grief, loss, want. But of course the funeral itself like every other vignette here is not filmed to sadden or crush. There is a distance here from which all this gloom is filmed which is the distance in which whatever real grief, loss, want, we would normally perceive in these lives (say, in a melodrama) evaporates as if absorbed by the dingy walls.The same woman repeats the song a little later but now casually in a bathtub, her husband is putting on a shirt in the background, a window looks out to bright day. There is a routine in what we do, yes. Elsewhere characters measure a carpet, rehearse their bass drum for parade, shake hands for a business meeting. They all look like they haven't had a good day in years, none of them a hero, all of it inglorious. But just what of all this we see isn't a world without grief, loss, want? Characters suffer, or seem to, but do we as we watch? The whole thing was like a breeze of air lifting human pettiness and desperation and showing them to be flimsy curtains that can flutter and let air and light through rather than just hang.Where you put in life to always have a lover or a pension fund? If any of these go, like the guitarist lover the girl searches for, they have been returned. Something lingers in the air, a beautiful dream here of a moving house. And when you are negligent of the 200 year old china that you smash trying to perform an impossible tablecloth trick because it was a boring dinner-party (a hilarious moment in the film), does anything prevent you, if it comes to that, from taking punishment with the same smile as part of only another absurd game?Some poignant satire, but even better, the mind that would fret and despair over suffering is not here, a stoic mind is.A marvelous image encapsulates this worldview, a brass band is rehearsing in an empty room, one of them is standing before huge windows playing his clarinet while outside a storm is heard booming and roaring. We are small, yes, and the outside is vast. But what prevents him from playing his music against the storm? If something does, he will stop then.

Payne McMillan I've been wracking my brain to figure out a good comparison in popular media to Roy Andersson's dark comedy You, the Living or Du Levande (2007). The best parallel I can draw is to Tom Wilson's comic strip Ziggy. If you are familiar with the comic, it revolves around a rather mundane little man, Ziggy, who always winds up being the butt of his own jokes. Luckily, Wilson's comic only appears once a week and is four short newspaper frames at most. You, the Living sadly perseveres for an hour and a half.The film is made up of dozens of vignettes. Some are very brief glimpses while others last uncomfortably too long. Almost every scene is taken in a single shot with a wide angle, with the camera positioned in one spot. Occasionally there are slow zooms, or pans that shift so slowly that the viewer is unsure whether the camera is actually moving or if they are just becoming drowsy from staring so long at an unchanging scene. I have never seen anything filmed like this before, with so few shots and perspectives. Most filmmakers try to engage the audience with diverse composition; this felt more like I was watching a play because of the static angle. It also had a theatrical quality because of the set. I found the set to be very pleasing to the eye. It reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson's films because everything in it seemed very deliberate, like it was in exactly the right place. This contrasted with the subject matter; the majority of characters were disheveled and were going through existential crises. They seemed not to belong to the pristine world of this elaborately constructed set. Many of the vignettes began with a character breaking the fourth wall and addressing the viewer, "Last night I had a dream," and the set successfully created the dreamy quality that many of the characters described. Andersson used colors that were very bright, vibrant shades and vibrant, but they were all washed out shades and seemed to be watered down. The fact that this film took place in contemporary time in an urban setting (an imitation of Stockholm) but all of the scenery was designed also added to the dreamy quality in which you know that you are in a specific place but it is different for some reason than the way you know it in reality.Though it was aesthetically well put together, when it comes down to it, I think this is a film that you'll either love or hate. I happened to hate it. It had aspects of the absurd in which there were scenes that could certainly happen, but they never actually would because they are far out. All of the characters were caricatures whose actions were disgruntling. They found themselves in awkward situations which were laughable and pathetic. It was like Family Guy because it was so stupid that I felt bad laughing, though that is not the strongest comparison because that humor is slapstick, whereas Andersson makes you cringe and chuckle at other people's misery. Usually, what began as humorous lasted half a minute too long, leaving me as a viewer anticipating the next bizarre event, tapping feet hoping to escape the current misery. Andersson admits that he has an expressionist influence, which I saw come through in this piece. The film was not so much plot driven as theme driven. It never focused on one character for too long but would switch between characters whose lives vaguely intersected. If any take away from You, the Living it would be, "when something is bad, it can only get worse." In one of the early scenes, a man is practicing the tuba in his apartment. It cuts to the man in the apartment below, frustrated with the noise bleeding through the ceiling. He bangs a broom against the ceiling to signal the tuba player to stop, but his broom banging ends up knocking down his chandelier. This pretty much sums up the "heads you win, tails I lose" motif. You don't get to really learn any intricacies of the characters. Instead they are all seen as one dimensional and are defined by a certain type of action rather than as multi-faceted. There is no passion for any of them, and ultimately, you don't really care that they are in miserable predicaments because none of them have depth. This is ultimately a very bleak film and even if you find it more amusing than I did, it will likely still leave you disheartened.

Hannah Lee Olson You, the Living (Sweden, 2007) captures every day life's sorrows, joys, and regrets through the world's best medicine, humor. Roy Anderrsson, the director and writer of You, the Living, uses off beat sarcasm similar to that of Monty Python to portray short clips of unglamorous people from all different walks of life. Although many of the characters appear to be in the dumps, the whimsical comments and random actions in the background make for a somewhat lighthearted film.Within You, the Living there is no clear plot line nor do all of the characters have an actual name but they all a story to tell. The film opens with a frumpy middle-aged man snoring and fast asleep on a sofa. In the background you can see that there is a fake skyline out the window, which added a humorous touch on the set. The man suddenly awakes and states: "I just had a nightmare". This first scene set the anticipation for odd and out of place interactions.In addition to the snoring man on the sofa there are several other absurd and rather interesting characters. For example, there's the tuba player that announces he lost his retirement money while having unexciting sex with his wife, the teacher that cries in front her class because her husband called her a hag, the man that gets invited to a dinner party and sent to an electric chair shortly after etc. Collected together these characters create a theme of the common man's life and how dismal yet silly it can be.A way that these strange characters escape their dismal lives and find deeper meaning is through music. Some of the characters are members of a Louisiana music band that plays at rather strange venues. Each individual member of the band is given their own independent life snapshot; showing them practicing their music while having rather boring lives. Though their lives are unexciting they're band is a offbeat and quirky. For example, the band plays upbeat New Orleans music at a funeral, which at first appears inappropriate. That is until a woman accompanying the band sings a song about living in a land without tears or sorrow. The song combined with the place and circumstance added to the nature of the film as I found it comedic, touching and somber.Intertwined with music there is a theme of desiring to be loved and feeling unloved. Anna, a hopeless purple boot-wearing romantic, desires to be with, Micke Larsson, the lead singer and guitarist of a punk rock band. Anxious to see him, she practices telling him that she thinks, "he sounded great" at the show, she wishes he called her, and ultimately that she loves him. None of these words are actually spoken to him, which reveals her desperate nature and desire to be loved by him. Towards the end of the film, Anna describes a dream in which she marries Micke. The dream has Micke and Anna post wedding relaxing in a moving house. The house comes to a standstill in front of a crowd of random people that congratulate them on their marriage. The scene was rather bittersweet because the dream was whimsical and charming but the reality is that Anna will always long for his love.Though all the characters faced quite different hardships one consistency was having random people with blank stares scattered throughout the majority of scenes. Literally almost every scene had a random nurse or bystander in the background that would stare directly at the camera as someone talked. At first I thought the stares were just to add comedic effect but it also brought attention to those in the background. This effect made me wonder who the main subject was of each scene. Additionally, it showed that extras could have an impact on the scene greatly when in a position to stick out.The director, Roy Andersson, used many camera techniques to make the scene comical yet bleak. For example, he used dark colored lens to show the baseness of the plain character's lives. In contrast with these colors he had fake painted skylines that made it hard to take the scene seriously. The majority of Andersson's scenes were used with a tripod and showed the entirety of the scene. This made me feel as though I was an additional bystander observing these people's lives whether it was from across a street, through a door, or against a wall.Overall the film was quite absurd and mildly entertaining in some scenes. I would recommend this film to anyone that like's Monty Python's humor and doesn't need an in depth story line to be entertained.

hansonkd This film is an exquisite exploration of the human condition. What makes us human and holds us all together is sometimes more important than the surrounding events that are taking place. This is the main premise for You, the Living, as we enter a peculiar world filled with grief, loneliness, and sadness. The film is set up as a staged performance. The camera rarely moves and the subjects are almost always sitting completely still and simply narrating or doing some other seemingly out of place action. When I first watched this movie, the first few scenes were something that I had never experienced before in my movie going past. I tried to figure out the genre of the film, but as more and more scenes went by the purpose of the scene construction became more and more clear. We enter into a dream like state. Everything in the movie when picked apart individually seems to be rather normal. But we still get a sense that there is just something off about the whole film. The timing is a bit awkward. People's interactions with one another are just a bit off. People's actions are out of place. What then can we say is the driving force behind the movie? There isn't a central plot to hold on to; we skip around to different characters that all end up in some way having interactions with each other. This strengthens the sense of dreaminess about the film as frequently you might have several seemingly disconnected dreams in a night but there is one thing that ties them all together. The construction of this film, when viewed in this way is extraordinary. You need the whole film to know what is going on. The film plot and story are not being acted out by actors, but rather the editing and the scenes themselves. You can look at just about any scene individually and write the movie off as almost being completely insane. A long shot of a man playing a tuba? A long hall with people standing on chairs and singing? People shopping for carpet to only have the clerk break down and pour out his heart about his marriage? These are all things weave together to address what we all feel as people. What we dream about, good, bad, rewarding is captured by this film. For example, we have a middle eastern barber who shaves the head of an arrogant customer. Anyone who works in a customer service industry knows what it is like to deal with pushy customers all day and how good it would be to just to act out. Another example would be the carpet salesman who all of the sudden went on a long rant about his wife. Or the Prominent man of the community who was interrupted before an important speech by his son asking for money. What about the old man who was sent to the electric chair because he broke his wife's dishes? These things when paired with the dreamy filming of the film make you question that perhaps the events that take place are simply internal anxieties that manifest themselves in the world. Perhaps that is what Andersson is saying about the human condition. Maybe our deepest anxiety is that we are truthful with one another and, in the words of the characters in the film, "nobody understands." Overall, this is a very strong film. It is a film that is unique from any other film that I have seen previously. As you watch you are memorized by the oddity that each scene takes on. Previous film techniques are almost forgotten. We have very little movement, almost no action, and the camera remains still throughout. On top of that the plot doesn't exist. Instead we are left with small episodes that offer little to no resolution of the problems they present. In each scene only the main character of interest truly "acts." The rest of the people present simply have little to no reaction to what is going on with that character. As such this is a film about lonely people who are desperately trying to seek out and connect with others. Some people will not like this movie. People looking for a typical Hollywood experience should stay far away from this film. However, if you go into the film with an open mind and stick with the film to truly find out what the film is about it is an absolute delight. It is quirky, witty, funny, and sad. Most importantly it reminded me of just how versatile film as an art form truly is. I would say that it is probably the most memorable and inspiring movies that I have seen.