About Endlessness offers crucifixions, a Hitler cameo… and a moving coda for a master director
Film Reviews About Endlessness
Note: The writer of this review watched About Endlessness on a digital screener from home. Before making the decision to see it—or any other film—in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here’s an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
As previously posited by Lars von Trier in Melancholia, depressive personalities spending their days racked with despair tend to assume a preternatural calm in the face of an oblivion provoking panic in the generally even-keeled. In About Endlessness, the latest film from Sweden’s greatest living director, Roy Andersson—another maximalist Euro-auteur with an ardent following of patient, morose-minded cinephiles—this principle envelops the text instead of coming from within it. Death has always hung over the large-scale moving tableaux that fill out his features, and he’s typically responded to it with bitter irony, mordant humor, or deadpan despondence.
But now, at age 79, Andersson has entered the September announced early on as the film’s setting. And with a far-from-prolific rate of production raising the grim question of how many movies he’s got left in him, there’s a palpable change in his outlook. After 50 years of filmmaking, has this intrepid explorer of existential darkness gone searching for something close to contentment? When he allows himself to find it, even if only in a fleeting wisp before the literal parade of suffering resumes, the moment feels like the richly rewarding culmination of his whole singular career.
Since he began expanding his comeback masterwork Songs From The Second Floor into trilogy form, Andersson has attracted charges of repeating himself to diminishing returns. His rigorous aesthetic consistency got him branded a one-trick pony, albeit with one miraculous, labor-intensive trick. While Andersson has continued in his signature style for this coda, erecting pallid beige-and-grey backlot dioramas with a painterly eye for crowded composition, he repurposes the technique toward a newfound elegiac, gentle register. “Isn’t it quite fantastic?” asks one bar patron to another as they take refuge from the snowfall blanketing the outside in cold white nothingness, “Silent Night” sounding out from a heavenly choir in the background. Asked what he means, he gestures outward and gives his elated reply: “Everything! Everything!”
That the cruel hand of fate does not undercut this transcendent gesture suggests an artist evolving, and accepting a generosity he’s always resisted. He won’t let us mistake that for getting soft, however. The snapshots of misery haven’t gone anywhere, only grown more introspective and resigned. The omniscient voiceover narration, delivered by a presence Andersson has likened to Scheherazade telling her tales, first peers in on a waiter pouring a glass of wine until it overflows and identifies him as “a man with his mind elsewhere.” Much of the torment this time around takes place internally: a man snubbed by an old school chum, a younger guy pining for the girl he can only watch from afar as she spritzes her plant, a wretch breaking down on a bus only to be told to take his sadness elsewhere. We see the aftermath of things more often than the things themselves, such as the instant regret left from a father’s gruesome honor killing of his own daughter, or the grief persisting for the parents of a war casualty. Someone lugs a crucifix up a steep hill as enraged locals beat him, but it turns out to be the dream of a priest in danger of losing his faith.
This emphasis on interiority reiterates itself through the visual makeup of the individual shots, which scale down Andersson’s grand creations for a humbler smallness in keeping with the truncated 76-minute runtime, one of the shortest of his filmography. In contrast to the more elaborately blocked centerpiece sequences in his past work, the most impressive feats here are done in miniature, the real jaw-dropper being a couple locked in a spectral embrace as their spirits float over an intricate model city’s charred ruins. Though a cameo from Hitler in his bunkered final minutes lends a historical sweep, the scope has mostly shrunk to a personal level, its passages of solitude replacing the stunners that once demanded hundreds of extras.
In the press kit, Andersson says in plain terms, “I am not a pessimistic person but the fact is: There is no hope.” Though one might be tempted to chuckle at the seeming contradiction, viewing the surrender of all light as a comfort makes perfect sense coming from someone who sees existence as an unending series of humiliations and indignities. Only by relinquishing the soul can it be set free to roam and serenely look down at the ashen hell it leaves behind. The murdered girl and the slain soldier no longer have to contend with the chaos and violence of the world that claimed their lives. Their only peace comes in death, an invisible presence Andersson greets like an old friend.
16 Comments
I think watching his trilogy is enough Andersson.
Rarely have I read a review that left me with so little an idea about what is actually in the film. Is it an anthology of vignettes?I guess this review was written for existing Andersson fans. I’m not sure what the rest of us can take away from it.
Yeah – it’s vignettes. I do recommend Roy Andersson, I don’t quite know that this review really does him justice though. Not because I disagree with how wonderful he is, but most Andersson films and most Andersson fans seem interested in pursuing meaningful discussion whereas this review seems largely immaterial.
If you ever get a chance to, start with “You The Living”. You can watch YouTube clips to get the gist of it, this review fails to give any sense of the comedy that is essential to his work.
“this review fails to give any sense of the comedy that is essential to his work”Haha, gotta be honest, this review makes it sound like it’s a boring AF exercise for all but the hardest of art school film nerds. Nice to hear that that’s probably not true.
This review is a misfire. (Sorry, Mr. Bramesco! I’ve liked some of your other work on AV Club, though!)
Don’t get it twisted, Andersson is pretty much only for the hardcore film school nerds (I count my myself among them). He just makes movie using the humor those dorks find funny.
This video essay will give you a good idea if this is going to be your thing or not.
Read it with a french accent and smoking a queen size cigarette and it makes more sense
One of my most vivid memories from attending Ebertfest, was seeing this film screened. It was easily the most divisive film I’ve seen at a festival. People either loved it, or thought it was pretentious twaddle. I confess I fell in with the latter group, but the memory of that film stuck with me, and as I matured, I grew to appreciate and even love his work. His vision isn’t for everyone, heck, most won’t get his work, but he’s got a vision, which is more than can be said of many filmmakers today. He has a vision that he sticks to, commerce be damned, and one will not forget an Andersson film once they’ve seen one.
Honestly, I think there’s room in my life for some pretentious twaddle. This past year has been an experience in watching humanity from a distance, and my word aren’t we a pretentious species? 🙂 (I’ll also always remember the experience of watching Songs from the Second Floor knowing absolutely nothing about it – I picked it up pretty much at random in the university library – and just WOW.)
For me the line is when a filmmaker insists on naming his characters “man” and “woman” or “him” and “her.” I wanted to like Tenet, but naming the lead guy, sigh, The Protagonist, made my eyes roll.
Neal Stephenson gets excused for his character “Hiro Protagonist” on the basis that Snow Crash was (at least partly) a parody of 1980s cyberpunk and its obsession with Japanese culture and names, though.
I wanted to like Tenet too. And I’ll watch it again and go there just for the spectacle. But. First time around it felt like Nolan had listened to every piece of criticism made against his films and decided to create a film that exemplifies every piece of it. Are there any actual humans in that film? Even the son is just a macguffin. I don’t think it’s pretentious so much as vaguely insulting. I say this as a fan of most of his films.
I just watched Tenet the other day and enjoyed it more than Inception, Interstellar, and Dark Knight Rises. I’m still trying to figure out why exactly, but maybe it has something to do with Nolan leaning purely into the artifice and structural/technical ideas that he always seemed more interested in than actual characters or humanity. Those other three films often felt overly self-serious, whereas the moment that Tenet almost literally handwaves away the question of free will with a single sentence something clicked and I was like “oh, this is a stupid movie that is clever, not smart, and it just acknowledged it.”
Adore Andersson’s work, and there is a quite brilliant documentary about him, Being A Human Person, released last year. It’s fascinating and dryly funny but also desperately melancholic, he pontificating on his age and ill health, not helped by his near alcoholism and obvious frailty and vulnerability. Essential viewing if you like the films, Andersson is a complex but enormously likeable character, and sometimes painfully honest. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9308410/?ref_=nm_flmg_slf_1
Thank you for reminding me that this site gave Melancholia a B+. A lower grade than Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I guess Melancholia just didn’t have the total forgettableness of the latter film?
Yes, those are two movies that totally make sense to compare to each other.