Pallid figures in striplit rooms with too much empty space: if you’ve seen a Roy Andersson film before, you’ll know what to expect from his latest essay on the human comedy. Truly human the film becomes only by cautious degrees, even if we start out laughing at rather than sighing with characters like the hapless salesmen Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holge Andersson), who only want people to have fun with vampire teeth, a bag of laughs and a sinister rubber mask. It’s a bit like a sketch show with running gags, but instead of diminishing returns this meditation on harsh, sad existence gets deeper as well as both more touching and horrifying as it progresses.
There’s also a new dimension with intrusions from the past. One sparse bar sheds 60 years and the deaf old man who’s been a patron all that time becomes a younger one listening to barmaid Limping Lotte singing a very special version of “John Brown’s Body” to an eager group of servicemen. In another, Charles XII stops off both on his way to the Battle of Poltava and on his disastrous return, a bad turning-point in Swedish history. A lesser filmmaker would seem self-indulgent at this point; the way Andersson sustains the parades outside the windows somehow hypnotises us into submission. Or me, at least; I can well imagine that some viewers may find it merely too boringly whimsical for words.
Whichever way you look at it, the Swedish director has his own stylish craft and sticks to it, a kind of stripped-down Wes Anderson – no relation, obviously – in immaculate compositions which really need a big screen for proper observation. Vignettes seemingly as disconnected as the characters themselves enrich the superficially soulless panorama of contemporary life; there are leitmotifs and refrains (the vain search for messages left on an answerphone, the ritual enquiry after the health of the person on the other end of the line).
A shocking absurdist denouement, if you can call it that in Andersson's world, seems mysteriously connected to the existential crisis of the hapless Jonathan, the human equivalent of the enduring pigeon in a chronically shy schoolgirl's poem who sits there worrying about money and flies off. As the film comes to an end, another day begins and a live pigeon is heard offscreen. If you go with it, this fable-making should stay with you. It’s appropriate to Andersson’s enigmatic spareness that there should be no explicatory extras.
