The absurdly long title of Roy Andersson’s latest film, “A Pigeon Sitting on a Branch Reflecting on Existence,” is actually the least absurd thing about it. Composed of loosely connected vignettes with a few recurring characters, “Pigeon” is, according to a title card displayed at the beginning, “the final part of a trilogy on being a human being,” the first two parts being “Songs From the Second Floor” (2000) and “You, the Living” (2007). This third installment quickly reveals — or quickly reaffirms, for those who’ve ever seen a Roy Andersson film —that there is not much joy in existence. There is instead the monotony of everyday life and the comedy of just making it to the end.Andersson is a mysterious figure. A former political radical who collaborated with the film collective Grupp 13 on “The White Game” (1968) — a documentary about student demonstrations in Sweden that the Museum of Modern Art screened as part of its 2014 “To Save and Project” festival — he later started creating commercials, reportedly more than 400, to finance his movies. Since “A Swedish Love Story” (1970), he has produced only four features, with such long gaps between them — up to 25 years, between “Giliap” (1975) and “Songs” —that Stanley Kubrick seems prolific by comparison.Andersson’s style is highly refined and formal. The camera never moves, each frame being meticulously staged, a Renaissance painting of detail, and, each scene is essentially composed of one shot; “Pigeon” reportedly consists of only 37 shots total. The performers move and speak in a precise manner, typically slowly, as if on the verge of collapse, and they tend to wear white powder on their faces, furthering the effect of expiration. The world depicted looks like the one we live in, but with something off-kilter, although it’s often hard to tell what that is.What is surprising is how often this dreariness is hilarious. Andersson has a way of extracting laughter out of suffering. Sometimes he uses repetition; many of the vignettes in “Pigeon” feature traveling salesmen Sam and Jonathan, who serve as tour guides through a world of constant rejection, repeating the same pitch, over and over, and never once finding a buyer. At other times, he introduces the surreal: In one scene, King Charles XII suddenly enters a bar with his soldiers and hits on the tapper behind the counter. But the humor is never safe or guaranteed — you’re prepared to laugh and then, suddenly, Andersson turns the tables, as in one frightening scene toward the end of the film that throws everything into grim shadow.When watching Andersson’s films, I always question whether he’s making fun of us. Is he saying that the world is a series of cruel and absurd scenes, repeated over and over, and are we all just unwitting actors playing our parts until we die? Something of that message certainly exists, but “Pigeon,” perhaps more than any of his other works, contains a dim light that grows brighter as it progresses. Throughout the film, various characters speak the line, “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine.” What seems at first like a satire of the way we fall back on clichéd platitudes becomes a mantra. We know the world is a hopeless joke, but we keep moving because that’s all we can do — try and try again. In the end, we’re doing fine.
↧