Some of the sketches don't really work or don't blend with their cousins, but the snapshot approach means they are short.
You, the Living (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:34
Fresh:34
Rotten:0
Average Rating:7.7/10
Consensus: Composed of humorous sketches of human behavior, Roy Andersson's You, the Living is an eccentric but highly entertaining and unforgettable work.
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
US Box Office: $0
Synopsis:
Film Forum is proud to present the U.S. theatrical premiere of Roy Andersson’s You, The Living, an absurdist take on the everyday foibles of human nature. Andersson couples his iconic visual style...
Film Forum is proud to present the U.S. theatrical premiere of Roy Andersson’s You, The Living, an absurdist take on the everyday foibles of human nature. Andersson couples his iconic visual style (stationary shots, a monochromatic palette of grays and greens) with a meticulous eye for composition (compared by some critics to the work of German painters Otto Dix and Max Beckmann) to yield a brilliant succession of dreamlike tableaux: a bride and her electric guitar-playing groom sail along in a house moving like a train; a distraught man complains of his financial woes while his wife tries to make love to him; a drunken woman shouts “No one understands me” to a bar full of silent patrons; a man waiting in line to buy a train ticket changes queues repeatedly, to no advantage. Running the gamut from quotidian struggles to big philosophical questions of love, sympathy and purpose in an uncaring world, Andersson brings a blast of distinctive Nordic humor to our universal woes.
Although he has directed just four features in four decades, Roy Andersson is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed filmmakers. His previous feature, Songs from the Second Floor, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 and had its U.S. theatrical premiere at Film Forum in 2001. In the mid-1970s, Andersson began a second career as a maker of humorous, exquisitely photographed, world-renowned television commercials for such clients as Citroën, Volvo and Lotto (which Ingmar Bergman once called “the best commercials in the world”). In 1981, Andersson founded Studio 24, a production studio in Stockholm, in order to produce his own movies in total freedom. The Museum of Modern Art will hold a full retrospective of Andersson’s work September 10 – 18, including the premiere of a documentary on the making of You, The Living. --© Film Forum
Director: Roy Andersson
Director: Roy Andersson
Producer: Johan Carlsson
Studio: Tartan Films
Reviews for You, the Living
a surreal still life that provokes the audience to find the absurdity rather than the tragedy
You, the Living suggests that we would do well to discover the joy we find in each other that so often goes along with the pain.
Essentially indescribable, You, the Living offers little help to anyone trying to get a handle on it in terms of a traditional narrative. But it can be quite funny if you're susceptible to Andersson's curious way of capturing the human comedy.
“Keaton-esque” hardly begins to describe this brutally deadpan comedy by Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs From the Second Floor), who seems to have translated the entire range of human misery into a loosely connected series of slapstick gags.
The result is in some ways a comedy with a twist of the knife, and in other ways, a film like nobody else has ever made -- except for its director, Roy Andersson of Sweden. Andersson’s You, the Living is hypnotic.
The lack of narrative cohesion eventually starts to wear, but the episodes and images are memorable.
Surreal and absurd, yet oddly captivating and filled with a dry, sardonic sense of humor, stunning visuals along with provocative critiques of modern society.
You, The Living, if only by virtue of a more intimate scale than Songs, benefits from a lightness of touch and even a thin sliver of optimism in some sequences.
The actors' skin is zombie-palled with plastery powder, like a fallout of some unknown catastrophe -- and the film is aptly bookended by apocalypse, a dream-premonition that's called back as a punchline.
No one views the world like Roy Andersson does. That fact alone is enough to recommend the Swedish director’s latest collection of interconnected, often single-take vignettes.
Presenting the funniest movie of 2009 (so far). It's You, the Living, a collec tion of 50 absurdist sketches written and directed by Roy Andersson, a talented gentleman from Sweden.
Roy Andersson’s film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.
More laughs -- belly-deep, thought-provoking ones -- are to be had in the first 10 minutes of Roy Andersson’s You, the Living than in all of Judd Apatow’s Funny People.
Andersson's tableaus of the everyday are full of feeling, especially from the women (probably after a drink or two).
Andersson is, at heart, an expert absurdist; to him, there is meaning in the meaningless and salvation in the ridiculous
Dreams figure prominently in You, the Living, which posits reveries as articulations of--or refuges from--deep-seated fears.
Made of 50 short, stiff scenes of human behavior, shot as dispassionately as wildlife, Andersson is either stretching the definition of cinema or returning it to its roots
A cold soup mix of Buster Keaton, David Lynch, Jerry Lewis and Terry Gilliam, hawking deadpan jokes as well as chilly, disheartening mean streaks in his blocky, deep-space single takes.
Jacques Tati’s puckish humor meets Ingmar Bergman’s angst in this erratic, eccentric gem.
Latest News for You, the Living
July 30, 2009:
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