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Songs from the Second Floor is a series of loosely connected scenes linked together via a thin narrative thread. Each scene portrays an instance of decay and social breakdown through the trials of a handful of central protagonists who suggest that they could have been picked at random amid the general malaise of modern existence.
Written and directed by Roy Andersson, the film is striking in its insistence on a static camera that records only one shot per scene, quite often in long and extremely stylised takes. Long-serving employees are summarily fired, furniture salesman burn down their stores for the insurance money, immigrants are attacked and stabbed in full view of a passive bus queue, and brilliant sons are institutionalised because they 'write poetry until going nuts'. All these sketches are quite magnificently filmed - their horror depicted in deadpan tones, played straight for minimal emotional manipulation. The scene of tube-train passengers breaking into chorus bringing the epic non-diegetic soundtrack right into the lives of these poor lost souls is pure genius and worth the entrance money alone.
The composition and framing of each of these surreal episodes is enforced by lighting and mise-en-scène that renders people and places alike a uniform grey-green. Indeed, everybody looks decidedly ill, white face powder giving an ashen complexion to characters who are relatively indistinguishable from the 'real' zombies that begin to appear to particular characters towards the end of the picture.
And this is the film's central task; to meditate upon the relationship between the living dead of today and the actual dead of yesterday. References to lost traditions are not the reactionary musings of a simple nostalgia but rather a searching philosophical accusation that the ideals of the Enlightenment have been surrendered to such an extent that people's humanity has become defined by their resistance or capitulation to the vagaries of the stock market.
It is through the comic representation of personal calamity and the humiliations of its protagonists that the film succeeds in portraying the absurd reality of modern life. And it is in the rich European tradition of articulating the absurd that this excellent film sits: if we could imagine Kafka smiling, he'd surely be doing so now. Existential crises and the 'death of God' (vividly represented by a garbage heap of crucifixes - the result of a misguided Millennial entrepreneur) are evident in the ubiquitous apocalyptic despair. In a representative scene, a nameless governmental committee are invited to suggest a way out of 'the problem' and one respected colleague declares confidently but resignedly, 'all we can do is hope'.
And here is the central metaphysical paradox: the film presents hopeless people (read 'society' or 'civilisation') with nothing at all, except hope. The common view, whether articulated in individual disaster or communal hell, is that the betrayal of the past is complete and non-reversible.
This is most strikingly apparent in the scenes with the returned dead, whether symbols of personal guilt (debtors come back to their creditors), or collective shame (a hanged Russian Jew lost in limbo). These absences and presences point to the extremely problematic inter-generational ethical relationships that exist in contemporary Europe, and which most of us choose to continue to forget, handing a vicarious victory to the destroyers of Europe's twentieth-century.
Make no mistake, Songs from the Second Floor is not the 'coolest comedy in town' as some would have you believe, but a dark and bitter indictment upon the state of modern existence and its betrayals of the ideals of the past. The fact that it is at times hilarious and uses humour to get at the truth so effectively is just one of the many strengths of this serious and ambitious film.
Reviewed by Yoram Allon
Reader comments about Songs from the Second Floor
Helena Pekhlivanidou (mosikina@yahoo.com) writes:
Hard and sad movie!
Nice and silly!
Very honest and absurd!
It just about our world,our life!
Laugh and grieve!
rino di cintio (dante8virgil@yahoo.ca) writes:
I rank this great film with
LA PIANISTE & DOG DAYS & LIFE AND DEBT..ALL IMPORTANT...AND PROFOUND...IF ONLY MORE PEOPLE WILL SEE IT....sad..if came and went too quickly...God Bless all the Directors of these wonderful and important films....thanks
Anthony Gird (antgird@yahoo.com) writes:
Fantastic film. Constantly haunted by the paradox of constantly sweating characters in a a dull cold place.
Wonder (Email address withheld) writes:
really absurd film full of despair!
don't know what to think about it...
but's it cool
Ivo Dimtchev (ivodimi@yahoo.com) writes:
I haven't even dreamed that I could have a chance to see a beauty like this.
Lorcan MacCurtáin (Email address withheld) writes:
A quite brilliant film, I loved the black humour in it.
If anyone wants to know why anti-capitalist demonstrations are happening all over the world, this film is a good starting point.
kim simonsen copenhagen (kimsimonsenhotmail.com) writes:
I believe that there are many themes in the film
- The anti-postmodernist theme (see the woman with the crystal ball at the meaning for the financial professors - I see it as the return of superstition in the project of enlighten, and therefore as something very post-modern)
- The collective guilt (see the sacrifice scene and the dead people in the end).
- The critique of the negative sides of globalisation (the airport scene, the elite tries to escape Sweeden in hard times and lay off 1200 people, see the solarium scene, and the humiliating firing scene in the beginning).
- The unrolling of the death of the Folkhemmet ideology (the LO man (fagforening) is in bed with the president of the company.
But mostly, I believe and I know there are other central ways of reading this film, that the film is about guilt, the collective and individual guilt.....from Stockholm...from Scandinavia ...straight to Treblinka and Austwich. Kalle is this persona, we can call postmodern-man or homo post-modern, that has forgotten to answer for himself (as Buber states), he cheats his wife and the ensurance company, stating his stupid philosophy,...... man maste have mat pa bordet, man maste ha det lite gott...............but Kalle is to find out that it is hard being a human being. His lies and his cheating is a picture of modern man, not knowing what is right or wrong, not believing in anything any more.....life reduced to a marketplace is poor, and the hope of the future, his son, a symbol of art and beauty, lies in an hospital totally in catatonic pain of this life, a life threatening weltschmerts.......and his beautiful and sad poems (Wallejo) is there no place for in a world without beauty.
People have lost fate, and the feeling of being together as a society. The social glue of a society is the respect for each other, and the autonomy of the individual, that leading forces, like the capital, military, the unions, the royal family end up sacrificing in the scene with the little girl. They, and Kalle have all lost it, this something is being able to answer for themselves, in the meaning that one individual will respect unwritten rules that he will not brake, because deep down he or she knows that these rules are essential, and something that this person respects. But if, like Kalle or the establishment, end up violating these rules, and in this case have totally forgotten what these rules are, and therefore what they are doing totally wrong, then we get the people in Sange fra anden sal - a society of people that no longer can answer for themselves, they are stuck, some literary in train doors, in the traffic....everywhere. And Jesus, Christianity is some cheap plastic junk you can buy. These can be the ingredients that can plunge the western civilisation into barbarism, and for example sacrificing humans.
Even the dead follow Kalle, some of them he had a role in putting into suicide, but Kalle can not answer their question....like his dead friend says....for you it will be hard to get any forgiveness....not from him...but in the sense of Buber...to really be able to answer for ones own actions. The film ends with all the dead, victims on the garbage dump, and still Kalle has nothing to say. The film does not leave a single grain of hope for this world, the modern society and the modern individual, that has decayed into barbarism and human sacrifice.
This judgment day vision over our modern civilisation, is of course motivated by the same urge as Orwell, Beckett, Kafka (Strindberg - det er synd for menneskene) and other dystopic writers, to make us see the dark sides of the modernity, and therefore opening our eyes before we go that far. Thus being a cry and a warning. Every dystopia contains maybe some dream and some hidden version of a better world.
omar (grekbumbury@yahoo.com.mx) writes:
quisiera obtener en DVD o VHS esta pelicula tan chida y postmoderna, en México causo furor entre la comunidad universitaria de la UNAM, si alguien me la regala perfecto!!. I WAN THIS FILM, CAN YOU GIVE ME A COPY?
rogelio nympheater (the_sofa_king_cool@yahoo.com) writes:
beckettish absurdity, ashes, poetry, surrealism, crucifixes, very dark humor and milk mixed in a blender..
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