CAPSULE: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015, Dir. Roy Andersson)

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. It actually does, in a way. Roy Andersson is pretty enamoured of his titular image. He opens with it. Stuffed. Enclosed in a museum cabinet. Stared at by his trademark pale faced-humans, who have about as much consciousness as the hollowed out bird itself.

He returns to it part way through his film in the form of a poem recited by a young girl with developmental difficulties, who probably exceeds the mental capacity of the other two put together. At least she, with some prompting, can string a couple of sentences together.

Andersson's stark absurdist images continue in this vein. Short. Sharp. Bewildering. Connected only by a few seemingly peripheral characters, who actually exist as the only discernible constants in the the film. There's a pair of gormless sad-sack party goods salesmen (Holger Andersson and Nils Westblom), an amorous flamenco teacher and the unwilling object of her touchy-feely affection (Lotti Törnros and Oscar Salomonsson) and an anachronistic King Karl XII (Viktor Gyllenberg) prone to galloping into local bars en route to Russia.

Through Andersson's taupe and tan purgatory (what we'd just call 'life'), these characters wander like the living dead, completing their bloodless day to day tasks. They comment with stilted apathy. They hint at their disillusionment. They cry in silence behind windows at the back of the beautifully composed static frames.

I probably don't need to underline that Andersson's humour and overall outlook on the routine meaningless of our existence is still very much intact, making A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence both a worthy conclusion to his 'Living Trilogy' and an existential flame-carrier of the sketch comedy of Monty Python. Only drained of any hint of sunshine.

Andersson's resigned, dispassionate world is as beguilingly beautiful as it is emotionally horrifying. He casts us as unthinking, happiness-deficient automatons, yet his vignettes are never too far from the mark, which is pit-of-the-stomach troubling. The impact does wane though. Andersson's delicate threads get thinner as his interest in maintaining his tangential stories dissolves. Despite the omnipresent style of the film's look, feel and thought, there are still some indelicate transitions, particularly when it comes to the director's rather blunt visual manifestation of colonialism.

★★★★

Trailer: