About End­less­ness

It’s pos­si­ble to pick out any sin­gle frame from any film made by the great Swedish direc­tor Roy Ander­s­son, and it would be imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fi­able as his.

The tell-tale signs include: actors who are all eccen­tri­cal­ly mis­shapen; their faces are light­ly smudged with white paint; they talk in a snail-like drawl; there are few, if any, loud pri­ma­ry colours in the frame (50 shades of beige is his time­worn colour palette); and every image has been sculpt­ed with an immac­u­late, fussy pre­ci­sion by a direc­tor who knows that the search for the­mat­ic puri­ty comes with polic­ing exact­ly what an audi­ence can and can’t see.

On the sur­face, About End­less­ness is more of the same. It’s a col­lec­tion of tragi­com­ic tableaux reveal­ing large truths about humanity’s every­day strug­gle for hap­pi­ness, but through the minute inter­ac­tions of lost souls, all wan­der­ing through the pal­lid pur­ga­to­ry that is Earth. On the basis of pre­vi­ous works such as A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflect­ing on Exis­tence and You, The Liv­ing, it may have felt fine to refer to Ander­s­son as a sketch com­ic work­ing at the lev­el of a con­cep­tu­al artist.

With this new one, he’s stripped things back to their absolute essen­tials, and has in turn deliv­ered a work of qui­et, almost unas­sum­ing tran­scen­dence. The art­ful­ness is ramped up, and the humour tamped down. Gone is the absur­dism of yore, and in its place a clear-eyed and stir­ring social real­ism that’s excit­ing­ly in tune with humanity’s most obscure desires and tendencies.

The film opens on a cou­ple fly­ing over a bombed-out city which resem­bles Cologne dur­ing World War Two. A dis­placed female voice then com­ments on the things she has seen, such as a boy in love, or a man beg­ging for his life, or a man who has lost his faith in God. She intones her nar­ra­tion in a qua­ver­ing trill, as if she too is utter­ly moved by the inci­dents she is witnessing.

There are bare­ly any punch­lines in this film, as each scene just drifts off into the next. The swift cut to black can occa­sion­al­ly catch you off guard, and you’re instant­ly forced to replay the scene in your mind to deduce its mean­ing or its focus, which is nev­er instant­ly obvious.

Aside from the fact that this is Andersson’s most naked­ly mov­ing film to date, there’s still much fun to be had from guess­ing how he’s phys­i­cal­ly able to cre­ate these mag­i­cal moments. Aside from a few exte­ri­or shots here and there, every­thing is filmed using sets and stages, and you’re left to mar­vel at just how he man­aged to, say, have a full-sized train pass through a sta­tion, or fash­ion a street scene where there are tiny fig­ures work­ing away behind shop windows.

Yet the biggest coup here is how he man­ages to cap­ture the poignant aspects of a woman sip­ping cham­pagne, or a father weep­ing over the body of his mur­dered daugh­ter. He cuts through the sheen of arti­fi­cial­i­ty with very real and affect­ing emo­tions, and even though he’s attempt­ed this many times in the past, here he man­ages to achieve an almost Zen perfection.

And for any­one who thinks that Ander­s­son is just a sol­dier of untram­melled despair, in About End­less­ness he deliv­ers the most ecsta­t­i­cal­ly joy­ous thing he’s ever filmed, as three young women break into spon­ta­neous dance out­side a café́. How great was it? Read­er, I wept.

About End­less­ness is avail­able to watch from 6 Novem­ber via Cur­zon Home Cin­e­ma.