A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (2015)
Where viewed: Loft Cinema in Tucson, AZ
Experience with film: none, although I like dark Scandinavian films.
Writers: Roy Andersson
Director: Roy Andersson
Principal Actors: Holger Andersson, Nisse Vestblom
Starting with three short scenes of “death” and ending on a meditation on “homo sapiens”, the Swedish feature A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE is series of vignettes that train you to see the dark absurdity of life, then turns your guts inside-out.
The roughly 40 scenes play out choreographed moments of mundanity with a razor-sharp sense of internal comedic timing. Example: As her class stomps through their steps, a flamenco instructor can’t help pawing one of her sweaty, young male students. A later scene has a ship captain pacing the cobblestone street outside a restaurant, trying to ascertain over the phone just when the party he was meeting up with cancelled on him. While his conversation plays out in its banality, we can see inside the restaurant and so we watch, silently, as the flamenco instructor once more tries to grope her reluctant student–this time over wine. In this scene, the laughs come from anticipation of something breaking loose in the background of the scene. You experience the build and release. Other scenes hit you like a brick thrown by an unseen assailant. A highlight of this is the invasion of a bland little modern-day pub by King Karl XII, complete with cavalry and footmen marching outside.
This looniness, played straight, gives the film the feeling of a book of Donald Barthelme stories sliced up and played at 33 1/3 RPM instead of 78. Technically, the part of the film that impressed me the most was the lack of camera movement. Each scene plays out in front of a fixed camera. Each scene is timed, composed, and choreographed with an organic precision. Only toward the end, when the relationship between our two bumbling gag-gift salesmen/protagonists, do we get any cuts within a scene. Otherwise, you’re left to patiently wait for each vignette’s curveball.
At some point the waiting, for me, turned from the Land of Anticipation toward the creeping border of Boredome. I reached the moment when I wondered “are we almost done” rather than “what’s going to happen next”. But in an incredible example of perfect timing, the film turns its gaze toward us. Literally. Accusingly. Horribly. This is the “homo sapiens” section. And it burns.
After this section, stray pieces of the film start to cohere. Lines of dialogue are imbued with a heavy, dark significance. The film pivots from observations of picayune absurdity to sadness and condemnation. But it’s thrilling stuff and the message feels wise rather than cynical. It’s an easy thing to say the World Is Shit–it’s far more difficult to show us our complicity, make us reflect on our own brooding inhumanity and misplaced trust in civilization. That’s an artist working with the assuredness of a master thief.
I don’t have the breadth of knowledge to call it a masterpiece, but I’m putting this film on a personal pedestal.
FADE OUT 