IMPECCABLY CRAFTED AND VISUALLY ARRESTING, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, the final chapter of Roy Andersson’s “The Living Trilogy,” is the wittiest, most engaging black comedy I’ve seen in ages. Mastering the art of setting antic action within a meticulously ordered mise-en-scène is not new (Jacques Tati comes to mind), but Andersson’s tone is hardly one-note: At once dour and hilarious, deadpan and dead-serious, it might be that of Ingmar Bergman in prankster mode. Though an introductory title informs us that Andersson’s trilogy is about “being a human being,” every one of this movie’s thirty-nine vignettes, exactingly framed in single-take long shots, seems poised to suggest a detached, even bemused, nonhuman perspective. Having worked in 35 mm, Andersson’s switch to the digital format has, in many ways, enhanced his aesthetic. The resulting increase of sharpness and depth (mistaken for “improvements” when 35-mm films are “restored” digitally) is here used brilliantly, inducing an overall evenness of tone and spatial configuration in Andersson’s wide-angle shots that not only adds to the movie’s painterly allusions—with its muted palette of grays and pastels—but achieves an otherworldly aura suited to its perspective. More than a concession to an inevitable trend, then, the visual hallmarks of digital incarnation, as Andersson exploits them, serve to cleanse his images of a facile naturalism while counterpointing a sensibility that is anything but pallid.
Among the painters Andersson discusses in interviews, he cites Breugel the Elder, particularly his Hunters in the Snow, 1565, in which the visual perspective appears to be that of the four birds perched on the branches of a tree in the foreground above the landscape. While hardly aerial, the carefully sustained angles and distances of Andersson’s camera assume a similarly objective, contemplative stance, which the titular pigeon seems meant to embody. In the pre-credit scene, a museum visitor gazes at a stuffed pigeon placed on a branch in a glass case; midway through, a shy schoolgirl describes her poem about a pigeon “reflecting” on its lack of money. Pigeons also coo now and then on the sound track. But only in the final vignette do these allusions become palpable when several people waiting for a bus suddenly react to the cooing offscreen, looking up in unison just before the movie cuts to black.
Though some vignettes have the same characters and locations, Andersson is less interested in weaving them into a narrative structure than he is in crystalizing the existential thrust of each one. Traveling salesmen Sam and Jonathan (Nils Westblom and Holger Andersson, respectively), for example, appear in ten scenes, peddling useless novelties (a vampire mask, a laughing machine), seeking payment from delinquent shop owners, or sitting forlornly in their rooms at a flop house. When last seen in the penultimate vignette, Jonathan, haunted by bad dreams and fears of meeting his parents in heaven, wanders into the hallway in the middle of the night, ruminating on human nature. If the interactions between these two seem a lugubrious riff on the routines of Laurel and Hardy, by the end they’re not too far from Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon.
Thematic connections also occur. Following the credits, there are “three encounters with death.” To describe these in detail would ruin the experience for the viewer. But it’s worth noting that the increasing distance of the camera from the first to the third evinces the wisdom demonstrated by the great clowns of the silent era: Close-ups were for pathos and tragedy while long shots were for comedy. Chaplin knew and made the most of the difference. The subtle range of feelings induced by each of Andersson’s “encounters” is a poetic reminder of the oft-overlooked symbiotic relationship in films—and digital works—between technical choices and emotional affects.
And yet Andersson’s darkest vignette gives the lie even to this truism. Set in colonial Africa, chained male and female slaves and their children are marched into an immense, bronze-colored drum, strangely adorned with horn-shaped musical instruments protruding from its surface. As the drum revolves, the fire lit under it burns its occupants alive, and their screams are turned into obscenely soothing music emitted through the horns. Here, the extreme long shot serves to underline the callousness of the evils perpetrated by colonial European nations in the name of king and country—a fact underlined by the subsequent vignette, in which aged, privileged Europeans look on at the horror indifferently.
A similar shift in tone occurs earlier in two ambitious set pieces, in which a contemporary restaurant is the setting of dual visits by Sweden’s beloved eighteenth-century King Charles XII and his army. In the first they are en route to a clash with the Russian army; in the second they retreat in defeat. While the humor lies in the movie’s unexpected turn toward the anachronistic—nicely embodied by Charles riding his horse into the restaurant—both scenes convey an equally unexpected poignancy in their sympathetic depiction of this king as a lonely, vulnerable young man. These moments, like the drum scene later, caution us not to reduce Andersson’s work to a one-dimensional view of the human condition. The implicit but unspoken questions that hang over every small-scale incident and character also loom over the image of the king on this incongruous historical stage: Where am I? What am I doing? And why?
But Andersson neither sermonizes, like Melville’s thunderously imperturbable Father Mapple, nor does he wring his hands in despair, like Bergman’s agnostic pastor in Winter Light (1963). History also confirms that unexamined lives make do with slight, but essential consolations. More earnest than the cliché “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine”—repeated into a phone by a number of characters to unknown recipients—is the refrain “What would life be without a shot?” sung by a chorus of regular patrons of a tavern, run by a fabulous barmaid-chanteuse, aptly named Limping Lotta (Charlotta Larsson). We go from the present to a scene in the same place in 1943, where, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Lotta sings of life’s ills while young men—possibly off to war?—line up for a shot and a kiss.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence opens Wednesday, June 3, at Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York. A preview of the film screens Tuesday, June 2, at 7 PM to members of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design as part of the series “It’s Hard to Be Human: The Cinema of Roy Andersson” (through June 27).
