Like being toured unwillingly round a sad, grey zoo. Andersson invites us to rue the banal complacency of his subjects (who physically refute stereotypes of lusty blonde swedes, to a man/woman) but gives no indication that he’s known any of the pleasures or pains of life that could kick these saggy automata into emancipatory action. In a climactic sequence, a girl dreams hopefully of married life but the happy scene is as boxy and stale as any other here, embellished only by the train tracks that take her house out of town as she unpacks glum wedding gifts inside. Our minds are portable prisons, it seems, and the flight of the bombers over the heads of even the city’s unmolested slobs with SS tattoos is inevitable. Cinema, elsewhere, provides enough ripostes to this dismal ‘comic’ worldview, though you could alternatively pick up the phone to a friend or take a walk somewhere new to do the same job in less time. Either way, it seems important to just look elsewhere.
widerthanpictures 