Songs from the Second Floor

A danse macabre that mixes Monty Python with millennial angst, Swedish obsessive Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor offered one of the decade’s most astonishing — and dementedly prescient — cinematic visions. It unfolds as series of 46 absurdist, expressionist (think Otto Dix, Max Beckman or George Grosz), and apocalyptic vignettes set in an undisclosed European city at the turn of the millennium, with western society apparently in the throes of some cataclysmic economic meltdown. Many of the strangely disconnected but overlapping episodes concern hapless Kalle (Lars Nordh), a portly middle-aged man who’s picked a bad time to torch his furniture business for the insurance money. The film’s jaw-dropping human sacrifice scene may be the most subversive and surreal representation yet of our helpless thrall to (and incomprehension of) the vagaries and caprices of global capitalism and the stock market. Brilliantly composed, shot with a static camera, bathed in ghoulish green light, and making extraordinary use of old-fashioned trompe l’oeil, Songs probes the social, spiritual and economic malaise of our times with Buñuelian black humour and disturbing visual beauty. ABBA’s Benny Andersson provided the score. “Bizarre, complex, hilarious” (San Francisco Examiner). “The work of a genuine and singular artist” (New York Times). Colour, 35mm, in Swedish with English subtitles. 98 mins.