A moment of surreal horror as a British Army regiment herd African slaves into a Borowczykian torture device, to make sweet music out of death and suffering.
Roy Andersson works slowly and his films are entirely disinterested in speed. After nearly fifty years within the Swedish film industry he has only fourteen directorial credits to his name. Since 2000 he has worked upon a trilogy of films that share a similarly austere aesthetic and droll humour. They also utilise hefty amounts of CGI to digitally enhance the sets and soundstages that proliferate within them, given each of the complex deep focus compositions a true painterly quality. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence follows on from You, the Living (2007) and Songs from the Second Floor (2000). As with both of those films it is a sketch work, more interested in sophisticated visual gags, comic ambiguities and surreal flights of fancy, than with anything as structured as a narrative. What distinguishes this final chapter of the trilogy, however, is the bleakly pessimistic quality of some of these vignettes.
Andersson is perilously close to both self-parody and audience critique. There are sequences in the film that seem to be calibrated for the purpose of deliberately challenging audience members who have laughed through the downbeat humour of the previous entries. How to make comic sense of scenes such as the mentally handicapped girl being coaxed through a poetry recitation by her teacher, or the monkey receiving electro-shock therapy whilst a scientist gossips on the phone to her friend, or – most audaciously – the African slave sequence featuring a torture device that seems to have crept out of the perversely moral imagination of Walerian Borowczyk? There has always been a bleakness to Andersson’s observations about his ghoulish characters, but that bleakness has invariably been tempered by a genuine affection for their struggles, and an empathy within the human comedy this creates. In A Pigeon… that has been replaced with a muted desperation and existential anxiety about the modern human condition that forces one character to repeatedly ask himself “Is it right for me to use others for my own fun?”.
The film actually begins with three curious deaths. The first is of a man straining to uncork a bottle of wine, and having a heart attack in the process. The second is of a woman who lies in a hospital bed clinging to a purse filled with jewellery and money – that her adult children are desperate to get their hands on – as death approaches. While the third is about a man who has dropped dead on a boat having just ordered a shrimp sandwich and a glass of beer. Each of these vignettes depicts a certain amount of human callousness and neglect. The wife of the man opening the wine is too busy singing in the kitchen to notice her husband’s predicament. The children of the old woman literally try to tear the bag out of the her hands. On board the boat the captain asks anyone if they would like a free beer or shrimp sandwich; to which query one gentleman passenger opts to take the beer. This heartlessness seems to predominate throughout the film, with people revealing a cruel selfishness in their behaviour that is both alienating and stultifying. In the same way that ambition and thwarted desire were motivators of much of the character action in You, the Living, here the characters are seemingly driven by a death-drive, an impulse toward annihilation.
In the opening pre-credit scene a harassed looking man wanders around the display cabinets of a museum. Two of the three casements display birds of prey in the process of preying upon a creature. The other casement has a tree in it, with the eponymous pigeon perched upon one of its branches. From the centre of this museum space, it looks as if the haunted human figure is being preyed upon and the pigeon looks on, musing. The humble pigeon is outside of the ridiculous cruelties and predations of human interaction and can appraise with due detachment the deranged, and deranging, human comedy that unfolds. Furthermore, this opening sequence introduces a key visual motif, namely the role of stasis within life. There may be human beings present in this film, but very few of them are either being human or are imbued with a sense of life.
There are some impressive vignettes that showcase Andersson’s stubborn adherence to the entrapping fixed frame. A flamenco class provides Andersson with the opportunity to explore a troubling relationship from an unusual angle. In this sequence a rotund female flamenco instructor leads a class through a dance routine, whilst occasionally physically groping and molesting the most agile and balletic of the male dancers, who is clearly discomfited by this physical attention. It is a direct gender reversal of the most commonly perceived predatory behaviour, namely the powerful male physically abusing a weaker female subordinate. The blatant nature of the molestation serves to complement this gender reversal and highlight how deeply disturbing such unwanted sexual advances actually are. Andersson doesn’t just leave the sequence there however, as he reinserts the flamenco instructor and her male muse into a later coffee shop/street sequence, in which a desperate attempt to reconcile or rekindle a love seems to be what is passing between them. This sly shift in context from the disturbing and horrendous to the despairing and heartbreaking is a frequent Andersson trope throughout the trilogy.
Ultimately, this feels like a harsher and less humane work than either of the preceding films. The recurring salesman characters do not have the same balance between ingratiating and pathetic qualities as say the alcoholic woman in You, the Living. Their desires and impulses are more ambiguous and, as a result, less compelling. One scene that does return to the well of fellow feeling that is so deep and rich in the earlier films is a delightful timeshift sequence, in which a deaf old man remembers the seductions of a bar owner back in 1943, that made a loyal patron of him. This is buried amongst the horrors that torment Andersson’s Gothenburg populace, who seem forever upon the brink of giving up, but, much like the frame, find a way to move on, no matter what.
Edited on 16/05/2015 at 17:58 (GMT): The review had originally claimed that the dance scene was a tango class, when in actual fact it is a flamenco class.
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