About Endlessness

About Endlessness

While it starts with a couple embracing each other and floating over grey clouds, “About Endlessness” is Roy Andersson’s least whimsical movie. That may be a good thing. Because of its deadpan surrealism, he was scathingly criticized for the trilogy made between 2000 and 2014 that consists of “Songs from the Second Floor,” “You, the Living,” and “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” and rightly so.

I saw this film for the first time in Venice in 2019, and here is what I wrote about it at the time:

It’s awfully nice of Swedish director Roy Andersson to make a movie called “About Endlessness” that clocks in under eighty minutes. Many filmmakers could really abuse the latitude that title allows.

The endlessness Andersson illustrates here is rather light (the movie opens with a shot of a couple floating above a formation of gray clouds) and connected to the idea of eternal return. “There was a man who did X,” “There was a woman who was X,” announces the female narrator, and we see, always in one perfectly composed single shot the camera never moves an invariably pale person performing said action or an ironic variation thereof.

It’s like if a mordant New Yorker cartoon were made into tableaux by Karel Zeman; Andersson should get Brian Cox to appear in one of his movies, he’s exactly their physical type. If ever there were such thing as an insouciantly profound movie, it’s “About Endlessness.”

On second viewing, it was the insouciance that occasionally stuck in my craw. In one of Andersson’s immaculately composed living tableaux which somehow manage to look unfussy despite having clearly been near-obsessively contrived down to every last frame a man with no legs is seen sitting in the corridor of a metro station, playing a mandolin. The narrator tells us that the man lost his legs to a landmine: “It made him very sad.” One hesitates to reach for the vulgarism ending in the word “Sherlock” but this is the kind of instance that highlights the sometimes thin line between dry and glib.

Still, one feels grateful for Andersson’s vision and visions. You can luxuriate in the pastel shades of his frames, which start from a base of gray and strategically sprinkle in bits of cream and blue throughout. He loves showing curved alleyways or roads; on one such road, a Christ figure in modern dress undergoes a station of the cross while figures from other vignettes yell at him to be crucified.

This is part of a narrative thread involving a priest who loses his faith and then torments himself and his therapist. Down another bend in the road, three cheerful young women walk past a café and spontaneously start dancing to a song by the Delta Rhythm Boys that’s playing on said establishment’s sound system. The film’s “endlessness” includes much absurdity and disappointment but its grace notes come through most clearly.

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