I struck gold with my Movie #2 of the San Francisco International Film Fest yesterday with Roy Andersson’s queasily funny comedy You, the Living (Du Levande), a film I’m already anxious to see again. There is no narrative (although the movie does begin and end with two pieces of a story): just a barely-connected series of almost-frozen tableaus in pea soup-green living rooms, offices, kitchens and bars (and an execution chamber), the camera in one corner dispassionately eyeing, the surreally ordinary lives of urban dwellers. (One review I read afterwards said that the camera moves exactly twice; too bad I missed one of those scenes!). There are a few recurring characters, most notably the disparate members of a brass band, but otherwise we catch people for the single minute they’re on screen, and then they’re gone, their escaping feet already licked by Lethe’s ice-cold wave. I’ll be writing more about this movie at the end of the year, I’m sure.
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