A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflect­ing on Existence

The third and final instal­ment of Roy Andersson’s ​“tril­o­gy about being a human being”, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflect­ing on Exis­tence is very much of a piece with Songs From the Sec­ond Floor from 2000 and its fol­lowup, 2007’s You, The Liv­ing. Each of the three films com­pris­es a series a dark­ly com­ic vignettes cap­tured by an unmov­ing cam­era with a focus so deep it bor­ders on the infi­nite. Andersson’s spar­tan but immac­u­late sound stages are pop­u­lat­ed by non-pro­fes­sion­al actors, who are caked in pale make­up that makes them appear zomb­i­fied and sus­pend­ed between states of being.

But if Andersson’s lat­est has an air of the famil­iar, the mat­u­ra­tion of the film’s ideas, the indeli­bil­i­ty of its images, and the flu­en­cy with it speaks to its maker’s pre­vi­ous work cements Pigeon as a vital instal­ment to the tril­o­gy. In fact, that rel­a­tive same­ness becomes Andersson’s ulti­mate theme, the film’s unspeak­ably per­fect last shot a direct rebut­tal to the idea that things should – or even could – be any oth­er way.

While Pigeon is the most invit­ing of Andersson’s films, it even­tu­al­ly reveals itself as a trap. Named after a bird perched above the action in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ​‘Hunters in the Snow’, the film begins with a mor­bid trip­tych of scenes that Ander­s­son help­ful­ly intro­duces as ​“three meet­ings with death”. These intro­duc­to­ry skits func­tion as a primer for Andersson’s style, accli­ma­tis­ing view­ers to a film world unlike any other.

Part recap and part seduc­tion, the prologue’s true pur­pose is a bit more nefar­i­ous than it seems: Ander­s­son is plant­i­ng the seeds of com­plic­i­ty, implor­ing his audi­ence to smile, chuck­le, and then laugh at the mor­tal mis­for­tunes of oth­ers. It’s an impulse that he’ll stoke for the next 100 min­utes before unleash­ing an ante­penul­ti­mate scene of unfath­omable hor­ror that con­fronts the crowd with their own sec­ond­hand inhumanity.

In the film’s incred­i­ble cen­tre­piece, which can be iden­ti­fied as one of nar­ra­tive cinema’s most impres­sive long-takes by the time it’s half over, two char­ac­ters have an encounter with Sweden’s King Charles XII, an ear­ly 18^th cen­tu­ry sov­er­eign remem­bered for his blood­thirsty aggres­sion towards oth­er coun­tries. In this one shot, Ander­s­son refracts the intrin­sic pow­er of the time-image through the lens of time itself so that the iner­tia of his­to­ry is felt in min­utes and cen­turies alike.

The set-up achieves a tran­scen­dent state of sus­pend­ed ani­ma­tion, as though every per­son in the shot has been taxi­der­mied alive. Andersson’s jaw-drop­ping reach into the past is made pos­si­ble by the tech­nol­o­gy of the present, tak­ing advan­tage of his dig­i­tal cam­era and its capac­i­ty to shoot for stretch­es of unin­ter­rupt­ed time far longer than film permits.

Where­as Songs from the Sec­ond Floor and You, The Liv­ing both end­ed on notes of despair, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflect­ing on Exis­tence resolves with a cathar­tic sigh of accep­tance, and maybe even hope. Its last act is one of sim­ple gen­eros­i­ty, and in a sin­gle moment Andersson’s tril­o­gy of self-con­tained suf­fer­ing blos­soms into a uni­fied still-life.