You, the Living

The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.

Perhaps my preference is best explained this way: I’d rather live in the world of You, the Living. Songs from the Second Floor is the one I’d rather watch.

Results are painfully amusing, frequently random and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.

You won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Recalling the work of Jacques Tati, this is a grim but amusing and ultimately successful effort.

Andersson particularly delights in left-outs: the guy who can’t squeeze into the bus stop during a downpour; the natty little suitor getting his bouquet smashed in a slamming door. The sum total is the reflection of a worldview -- sad sack, bordering on “Everybody Hurts” black-velvet sad-clown bathos -- rather than any narrative.

The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.