Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Stefan, a young taxi driver, accompanies his father Kalle to the mental hospital. They have come to call on a second brother, Tomas, a man content to sit and say nothing all day long. "Poetry made him nuts!" claims Kalle, hysterically. Stefan, with a head more level than his old man's, tries to console, rather than berate. He kneels in front of his brother's chair, looks him straight in the eye, and recites the following poem:

Beloved be the unknown man and his wife
My fellow men with sleeves, neck and eyes
Beloved be the one who sleeps on his back
The one who wears a torn shoe in the rain
Beloved be the bald man without a hat
The one who catches a finger in the door
Beloved be the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame
The one who pays with what he does not have
Beloved be the ones who sit down¹

Throughout his recitation, Kalle has gotten himself more and more worked up, to the point where a pair of orderlies are forced to drag him down the hall, in an effort to keep him quiet. A doctor, standing in the corner, is revealed to be a fraud, merely a patient who stole the real doctor's smock. Screaming can be heard from distant patients in distant rooms. Despite these distractions, Stefan continues with the poem. It is important enough to include here, in the middle of Swedish director Roy Andersson's "Sånger Från Andra Våningen" ("Songs from the Second Floor"), for several reasons. Firstly, it was written by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who was best known for his existential surrealism, an artform that this film prays at the altar of. Secondly, it is first quoted during the film's opening credits, and then sporadically throughout the narrative. And thirdly, it serves as a de facto table of contents, cataloguing most of the stark and poignant motifs the viewer will find in this often convoluted but always engrossing film.

Things begin with a jarring and abrupt opening. A man stands beside a tanning bed, as bright light erupts from its foot, bathing the room in artificial blues. "Everything has its day," says the man hidden in the bed, whose face we never see. He proclaims "a new day and age", and shows no remorse for the company he runs, which is on the verge of folding. This pre-credit sequence effectively sets up the rest of the film, with its use of apocalyptic talk and static cameras.

The film becomes a series of temporarily dyadic relationships, wherein a victim and a victimizer each come out more worse for wear in the aftermath: A man is fired from a job he held for 30 years, a fact that torments the man who fired him; a magician accidentally slices open the belly of a volunteer, and is wracked with guilt (though not enough to discard the defective saw); the aforementioned Kalle, a furniture salesman, steals from his former partner, and is tormented by the man even after his resulting suicide (remember: "The one who pays with what he does not have"). People, in Andersson's world, are tied to each other through pain. Eternally.

It is Kalle who, for lack of a better word, acts as our protagonist. Only in the sense that we get to spend more time with him than any other character. Neither he nor anyone else has any effect on the forward momentum of the plot, seeing as there isn't any anyway. "Songs from the Second Floor" is structured as a series of tenuously-connected moments, each relating to the last thematically if not narratively. Kalle, the closest thing we have to a consistent guide, is prone to out-of-the-blue rants, owing mainly to the fact that his furniture store has just burned to the ground. This also neatly explains his existential sadness. "It's not easy being human," he says self-loathingly, at one point, upon entering a "Nighthawks"-style coffee shop. It's certainly an appropriate setting for a film this desolate. Though in Andersson's version the camera is on the inside looking out, while Edward Hopper's painting ("not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have […] of being on our own in the human condition"²) keeps the eye of the viewer on the outside looking in.

It's an important distinction to make, for it's a conceit that becomes even more important when you notice the omnipresent traffic jam, lurking ominously in the background. It's been going on for 8 hours, or more, and everybody knows its there. But nobody seems to know how it started or just where everybody is going. I happen to think their destination is more than obvious: they're going anywhere but here.

Andersson's camera, and the way he uses it, gives the film a startling visual look, to compliment the minimalist narrative style. Every scene is composed of a single tableaux. The camera is set up in one corner, or off to one side, and it just sits there, motionless, documenting the action. Takes are long, and at first glance quite static. But after a while you realize that each set up is like a mini painting, and, despite the aggressive use of one-point perspective that flows deep into the background, several things are always going on at once. It's an unusual visual style to inflict on the viewer, but it often works. The viewer becomes a voyeur, more so than any other film, in that he must sit still and wait for something to happen.

The anxiety this causes is doubled when one notes that, except for the people, things rarely move in the frame. But when they do, the effect is startling. This is never more effective than in a scene set at Hanover's Expo 2000: a pair of salesmen sit still at a table, talking. The man in the foreground is selling large carvings of Christ on the cross, one of which appears defective. While a gaggle of assistants look haphazardly for a second nail, the Wooden Saviour swings by his one crucified wrist, like a Pendulum of Nazareth. It's a joke that's just twisted enough to be massively funny.

It's also just one in a series of stunning images that Andersson throws at his camera: A man dangles helplessly while his hand is stuck in the door of a train (remember: "The one who catches a finger in the door"); a seemingly empty field suddenly reveals an army of black-clad ghosts; a young girl is ceremoniously blindfolded and tossed over a cliff, for reasons we'll never know. While it's often hard to follow, and even harder to understand, "Songs from the Second Floor" at least remembers to be powerful to look at.

Ultimately, the film is about the passage of time, and what it does to a human race that can't know what's in store for them in the ominous future. You can see this in the decrepit presence of a 100-year-old man, the former commander-in-chief of the army and the largest landowner in the country, whose main duty now is to try not to soak the bed. Or in the millennial angst that runs rampant over the film (Jesus is mockingly called "the birthday boy" at one point; then later, when his salesmanship is disproven, he's called a "crucified loser"). I suppose the message, if a film as aggressively ambiguous as this one could be said to have a message, is this: instead of trying desperately to "sell something with an extra zero", why not take a seat, watch the traffic laze its way by, and love and be loved?

----------
¹It turns out this is just an excerpt. For the complete text of the poem, try http://frankshome.org/Vallejo.html

²from Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces: Sister Wendy Beckett's Selection of the Greatest American Paintings by Wendy Beckett and Patricia Wright

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD