SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) ***1/2

Reviewed 7/5/02

This is a movie the Luis Bunuel of PHANTOM OF LIBERTY would love.  A series of surreal painterly tableaux that plays like minimalist Terry Gilliam centers on an entrepreneur-turned-arsonist with two sons – one a poet in an asylum, the other, a taxi driver – and a few other recurring characters (mostly old or overweight or both).  An eternal traffic jam plagues the city, which along with the film’s apocalyptic feel pays homage to Godard’s WEEKEND.  Almost all the scenes occur as carefully framed, still-camera single takes that incorporate droll foreground and background action.

The tone is unrelentingly drab with the air of death hovering over it all.  It attains the effect of a Magritte painting while focusing on more Dali-esque content.  The movie is filled with indelibly haunting black comic imagery – a homeless man frightening away rats, a hundred-year old man imprisoned in a crib, a horde of citizens laboriously dragging all their belongings across the enormous space of an airport terminal, and many more.  Writer-director Roy Andersson makes sly and sometimes not so sly (some would say facile) criticisms of capitalism, organized religion, and bureaucracy.  All of it is nicely abetted by Benny Anderson’s unobtrusive classical-sounding score.