Songs From the Second Floor (2000, Swedish)

I didn't make it to the theater this weekend (and neither did anyone else, Mr. Tom Cruise! Hah!), but I did watch a very weird, very slow Swedish film called Songs From the Second Floor. Generally, I'm not one to mind extremely slow, episodic films (as you can probably tell from my profile), but I nearly shut Songs off midway. Not that it was necessarily bad, but it didn't really seem to be doing much of anything.

The film takes place in Sweden, perhaps in a slightly futuristic, near-apocalypse world. There are endless traffic jams, religious crises, corporate and independent business is on the verge of collapse, the dead stalk the living, etc. There's no real story, per se, just a cycle of semi-joined episodes, some featuring the same characters, some seemingly unrelated. Songs is close to being funny (or perhaps I was just in the wrong mood), as many aspects of life in this weird alternate reality are quite literal - for example, being "haunted" loses all of its metaphoric meaning. However, there's a sense of melancholy that prevents the nascent humor from developing. If Songs is a satire, it's a straight-faced one.

Visually, the movie is quite interesting - some very beautiful and haunting set pieces (reminiscent of Gilliam's Brazil or perhaps a very stark Jeunet film), and almost everything is captured with a medium-shot stationary camera. For the entirety of the film, the camera almost never moves, to the point that when it finally begins to track movement in a few late scenes, it's quite a surprise. I do not recommend watching it on a small television - between the relentless medium shots, which contain incredible detail, and the subtitles, you might lose a lot of visual impact.

Thematically, Songs seemed a bit obvious, but then, I don't know a lot about contemporary Swedish life, so this may be one of those films that means a lot more if the viewer is invested in the social system from which it arises. I'm giving the film the benefit of the doubt because it has gained a bit of popular critical attention (if you consider Roger Ebert a critic, and not a reviewer), but I'm still not quite buying it.