You, The Living

EXCLUSIVE LIMITED RUN! ► "No one else makes films like Roy Andersson," wrote critic Jason Anderson in a recent issue of Cinema Scope. The singular Swedish director, subject of a Pacific Cinémathèque retrospective in 2005, is best known as the maker of the mind-bending end-of-the-millennium masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor (2000), one of our favourite films of this decade. You, the Living, Andersson’s follow-up, unfolds in the same visionary, Monty Python-meets-Ingmar Bergman mode, mixing dark, deadpan, absurdist humour, apocalyptic angst, and exquisitely composed visual tableaux. The title comes from Goethe; the film, debuted at Cannes in 2007, is one of only four features this perfectionist artist has made in 40 years. "One of the supreme absurdists of our time, Andersson serves up a series of immaculately conceived vignettes of appalling urban life. Set in a perpetually cold, smoke-diffused Northern Europe, they’re constantly surprising and often outrageously funny. Working in long, static takes on intricate studio sets, he challenges his hapless characters at every turn. One sublime conceit — a honeymoon house that glides through the night like a train — provokes the thought that, for Andersson, in a world always on the brink of disaster, the only true salvation is in our imagination" (David Thompson, Film Comment). "Hypnotic ... An extraordinary achievement...Anderson [has] a technical, compositional rigour that puts most other movie-makers and visual artists to shame. And he really is funny" (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian). Colour, 35mm, in Swedish with English subtitles. 95 mins.

Plays in a double-bill with Marco Ferreri's Dillinger is Dead.