YOU, THE LIVING (DU LEVANDE)

Rating: 4

The somnambulant denizens of Roy Andersonn’s YOU, THE LIVING (DU LEVANDE) inhabit a dreary world that barely has color and, for the living of the title, barely any present tense. Theirs is a placidity that is barely two steps from torpor, even in the face of emotion, even in the face of death. The several intersecting lives under scrutiny live in a future that gives them little to look forward to, and dreams that offer solace or terror, either one of which is an improvement. Here are 50 scenes filmed in one take, that are seemingly mundane their appearance, yet teeter existentially between tears and laughter.
It starts with a quote from Goethe, wherein the dead envy the living and urge them to live before Lethe’s coldness grabs them for good. Lethe, in a fit of puckishness that is brief but pointed, is also the name of a streetcar. Desire comes to mind, and the delicate illusions fostered in Tennessee William’s play about a streetcar by that name and the good they did Blanche Dubois. The action, such as it is, starts with a static shot of an office in tones so beige that pigment fails to register with the viewer. A man sleeps on a sofa that is too short and wakens with a start, having dreamed of being bombarded. Dreams, waking and sleeping, are the stuff of everyone’s life. As is perspective, which Andersonn uses to playful effect in a film that is dourly hilarious. People go through the ennui of their lives with varying degrees of irritation to themselves, each other, and the audience. A woman weeping over her loveless states sends away her boyfriend and her dog, both of whom would rather stick by her. Her outburst, which seamlessly becomes a musical interlude with her voice strident yet plaintive, provides a bland distraction for a quintet of chefs, only their heads and toques visible over their collective windowsill. Tuba bursts wreak havoc within a marriage, drums become a metronome pacing the way to the grave, a formal dinner party, a singular game of musical chairs, and an antique soup tureen becomes the symbol of a painful death presaged by elegantly inlaid swastikas. By the time the psychiatrist of the piece delivers his monologue to the camera, white-faces with the fatigue of 27 years of trying to make mean-spirited people happy, his revelations about the hopelessness of it all are more comic relief, and a blessed one at that, than revelation.
Andersonn’s static world, unjarred by color or genuine human interaction, is a surreal still life that provokes the audience to find the absurdity rather than the tragedy. It’s disconcerting yet devastatingly effective: the image of a man closer to his death than his birth, spending an intimate moment with a woman fretting over his hedge funds rather than her lackadaisical building of excitement is a precis on a life lived in the anywhere but now; a sequence in which a group of witnesses to an execution munch on popcorn as the victim is told by his weeping attorney to remain calm establishes the relative value of life and property; a lovesick groupie weeps her dashed hopes to a sere landscape, and the gentle bliss of her dream of wedded bliss to a bar crowd more interested in getting a last order in at last call.
The final image, people looking up rather than down or inward, serves as a delicious jibe and rebuke that is as dreamlike as the film itself. Is it menacing, or is it relief for those we’ve met? That’s for the audience to decide.