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. It is about the loss of hope, about the breakdown of all systems of hope. I love how these surreal films makes us reflect on our own life and the (sometimes absurd) society we live in. "[5], A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Brothers Manaki International Film Festival, "The New Cult Canon: Songs From The Second Floor", "Festival de Cannes: Songs from the Second Floor", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Songs_from_the_Second_Floor&oldid=974801504, Films whose director won the Best Director Guldbagge Award, Articles containing Swedish-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2015, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Best Non-American Film (Bedste ikke amerikanske film) Roy Andersson (director), Norwegian Film Critics Award Roy Andersson, Best Direction (Bästa regi) Roy Andersson, Best Screenplay (Bästa manuskript) Roy Andersson, Best Cinematography (Bästa foto) István Borbás and Jesper Klevenas, Best Achievement (Bästa prestation) Jan Alvemark, Best Foreign Independent Film - Foreign Language, This page was last edited on 25 August 2020, at 03:09. It proceeds with a series of set-pieces in which the camera, rarely moving, gazes impassively at scenes of absurdity and despair. 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. a. Since a conventional narrative would likely limit its scope, Songs From The Second Floor doesn't have much of a story, instead unfolding in a series of astonishing tableaux, sequenced roughly in tone from bad to worse. In a coffee shop someone is waiting for his father, who just burned his furniture company for insurance money. Its characters are piggish, ignorant, clueless salarymen who, without salaries, have no way to be men. Songs from the Second Floor (Swedish: Sånger från andra våningen) is a Swedish black comedy-drama film which was released to cinemas in Sweden on 6 October 2000, written and directed by Roy Andersson. "I staked everything on a loser," he complains. Yes, and tragic Groucho Marx. The film uses many quotations from the work of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo as a recurring motif. Oh, but yes, the film is often very funny about this bleak view. Where are we humans going? Perhaps the sacrifice of her life will placate the gods who are angry with the corporation. Not Coming to a Theater Near You is a film resource that assumes a bias towards older, often unpopular, and sometimes unknown films that merit a second look. Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed. The frail old timer is sitting up in a hospital crib with a bedpan under him as if imprisoned, while the doctors are expounding to the nurses about his enormous wealth. 1. There is a total of forty-six shots in the film, each of which (with one notable exception) is a static, wide-angle composition that frames an entire episode. The film can be best judged in how provoked the viewer was by it as a genuine oddity. I have probably not convinced you of that. And with its defiantly irresoluble conclusion — an ambiguous Second Coming on a trash heap — it leaves its viewer with a sense of uncertainty that is perhaps all too familiar. The film argues that Western civilizations’ hopes are derived from its economic system and not from its religious beliefs, and if that system failed its citizens they would be left without hope. Understandably, it did not immediately find a distributor. A magician saws a volunteer in two. Songs from the Second Floor 2000 ★★★★½ . The musical honors are provided by Benny Andersson of Abba. Andersson has dedicated the film to the early-20th-century Peruvian leftist poet Cesar Vallejo, and often uses the poet’s refrain “Beloved be the one who sits down” to make an absurd point. 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.