Whether by accident or design, it is most characteristically droll of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson to title his sixth fiction feature “About Endlessness,” only to have it clock in at ju…
,” only to have it clock in at just 76 minutes. Barely have you settled into its cockeyed cosmic view of human existence in all its infinite, cyclical tragicomedy than the credits are already rolling. With Andersson appearing to view our societal foibles as simple, consistent and doomed to eternal repetition, what might seem a vast topic ends up with rather a succinct essay from the 76-year-old veteran. Humanity, in short, is at once endless and easily, elegantly distilled.
Yet if the cut-to-the-quick running time of “About Endlessness” has you wondering if Andersson has changed his form, rest assured that his first film since 2014’s Venice Golden Lion winner “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” finds the filmmaker up to most of his usual unusual tricks: It’s a series of brief vignettes, mostly disconnected but for a couple of mournfully running threads, that look in with the same distant but dimpled gaze on scenes of banal everyday ennui, dark...
Indeed, the next scene reflects the first, and breaks the spell: From a slightly lower vantage point, atop a small hill, an older, less closely touching husband and wife gaze desolately out at the beige city skyline. “It’s September already,” she glumly notes. Summer is over; it seems romance, for Andersson’s purposes, is dead. Things get more morose from there.
Elsewhere, we dip into the past, with the same jaded, jaundiced eye Andersson casts on the present: One sketch sees Adolf Hitler entering his cramped, dust-leaking bunker in his final days, meriting only a sluggish, futile “Sieg Heil” from his remaining colleagues, while another looks on impassively as defeated German troops march in meek, neat formation to a POW camp.
Andersson can be idly classified as a Nordic miserablist, though to do so is to overlook a lot of his mirthful poetry — and sure enough, even after its lilting intro, the film finds pockets of joy and intimacy amid more conflicted musings.
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