Review: SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR
by Lucy Johns, SF Art and Film mentor
Scandinavia has a proud artistic and philosophical tradition accentuating the negative. Kierkegaard (Denmark) published “The Concept of Dread” in 1844, introducing “angst” (existential dread) into philosophical discourse. Ibsen’s plays (Norway), Munch’s paintings (Norway), Lagerkvist’s parables (Sweden), Bergman’s films (Sweden) – all grapple with the meaning of life, the nature of sin, how account for suffering if god exists, or if he doesn’t *then* what. Swedish director Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Story” is a worthy addition to this creative exploitation of irremediable melancholy. “Songs” is unique, however, for its mordant wit. Andersson exhibits a talent for scenes where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He sustains this unsettling duality for an entire arresting film.
“Songs” covers a range of mundane human predicaments through a string of short stories where numerous characters suffer personal catastrophes. It opens with a desperate businessman pleading with a partner visible only as a pair of feet black against a phosphorescent tanning bed. Their firm has to close, whatever tragedies might result. The first casualty is a weeping employee clutching at the businessman as he marches down an endless hallway lined with doors open a crack to witness the misery, then closing one after the other on the hapless clerk out of a job. A foreign worker can’t find a contact in the firm’s building. When he exits in confusion, he is assaulted by thugs who mock his Swedish and beat him senseless as a line of white-collar workers watches from a bus stop across the street. Next up: a distraught storekeeper who has set fire to his own shop argues with impassive insurance inspectors about valuables he can’t document and they can’t see. This bathetic scene introduces a cinematic flourish that recurs throughout the film: a busy background tableau. The merchant whines while a crowd of office workers struggles down the street flagellating themselves like their medieval ancestors. Is his despair comparable to the Black Death? Don’t be ridiculous, the director suggests. [Bergman also showed flagellants (“The Seventh Seal”). A strong cultural reference in Sweden, it seems. You think you have problems? Just remember *that*.] Further stories ensue. Some end abruptly, some continue later. All share the endemic despair and tragi-comic directorial commentary so marked in this film.
“Songs” disposes mercilessly of patriotism, superstition, and religion as strategies to keep fear at bay. A famous general sits on a bedpan in a nursing home while visiting military brass celebrate his 100th birthday. “My regards to Goëring,” he barks, raising a brisk Nazi salute. This is Andersson’s response to a character stuck in a grid-locked taxi who invokes history and tradition as lifelines to sustain sanity. Uh-huh, grunts the director: Here’s our history. (The Swedes pursued “neutrality” with Germany during WWII, one reason they were not attacked or occupied, as Norway and Denmark were.) An august Economic Council meets to pronounce on the country’s future. While an aging expert fumbles through his papers for an answer, his colleagues pass a crystal ball from hand to hand. When the group storms out of the room in a panic while the Chairman intones how important it is not to panic, a gypsy fortune teller remains at the table, lace tablecloth spread on the table before her. The most provocative symbolism mocks religion. A gum-chewing bishop sought for spiritual comfort discourses on housing prices. A replica of Christ in an exhibition hall of commercial crucifixes swings rhythmically from its cross by one hand while a salesman fumbles for a nail to attach the other. Andersson doesn’t stop at Christianity. A huge zoom out depicts a human sacrifice of “the bloom of youth” as dozens of church and state leaders officiate. Religion, invented by man for solace and explanation, revels in murder.
Sex, a more fashionable source of respite for modern man, is in this film yet another occasion for torment. Only women are eager for it. The available men are preoccupied or totally passive. This treatment is reminiscent of early Bergman: woman as temptress, beyond the comprehension of mere males who need and annoy females in equal measure.
“Songs” shows only a moment of redemption from the incessant disasters that can be hilarious to onlookers: a man already sympathetic from other scenes cradles his lover blowing into a recorder while he plays the keys. The image is sweet, the flute’s music a moment of calm in the cascade of imbroglios so inventively mined for commingled dread and ridicule by the director. (Andersson also wrote the script.)
“Songs” might well have degenerated into farce à la Monty Python were it not for Andersson’s remarkable cinematic skill. Almost all the film’s stories were shot in a warehouse meticulously transformed for every change of scene. This knack for design verges on genius when we see a vast airport corridor lined with immobile ticket agents who watch a dozen doors pour forth panting passengers straining to get away from it all while hauling towering piles of baggage they can’t leave behind. Many scenes repeat compositional touches introduced early on: the long receding perspective, the background action. The film’s color palette is drained and bleak: light in Scandinavia is pale at best and anyway absent half the year. A static camera films the few outdoor vignettes to stress the enormity of space compared to the puny actors in it. Every shot proclaims the absurdity of existence and the futility of protest.
Andersson’s sensibility and eye produce a film so rife with images and references that a review is bound to neglect important features (e.g. the role of the sick and the dead as they interact with the living). In this he recalls Bergman and Fellini. That he has failed to find their fame with American audiences may be a mark of his unremitting pessimism. If there isn’t any sex to relieve it, we don’t want to know.