A Pigeon Sat
on A Branch, Reflecting on Existence
(2014)
I haven’t
seen the previous instalments of Roy Andersson’s “Living” trilogy (“a trilogy about being a human being”), and
on the evidence of A Pigeon Sat on a
Branch, Reflecting on Existence, I won’t be in any hurry. This Swedish
black comedy appears to have been nigh-on universally acclaimed, including
winning The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which rather suggests I’m
an ingrate for failing to appreciate it. I was frequently put in mind of the
sort of thing Monty Python used to
parody, high-brow European art house fare pregnant with devastating insights
into the human condition. It entirely failed to persuade me.
But Pigeon (admittedly a great title) is
clearly intended to tickle too, in its ponderous, fusty, precisely-mannered
way, proceeding through a series of studied vignettes from “Three meetings with death” (juxtaposing
mortality with mundanity; sons attempt to steal their mother’s handbag filled
with valuables as “You don’t get to take
this to heaven, mother”), to a rotund dance instructor molesting her male
student, to the regularly re-joined duo of vampire teeth salesman having
trouble collecting their bills, who are inevitably also on the receiving ends
of demands themselves.
Charles XII
enters a café, horsemen in tow, making advances on the young bartender through his
equerry, and it plays like a surreal Season One The Young Ones sketch, only without the laughs (it must be that dry
Swedish wit). There’s a visually audacious sequence in which slaves are sent into
a huge boiler which then rotates under pressure, apparently a commentary on the
country’s complicity in colonialism, but… Ah, I just couldn’t summon the will
to care whether that’s what it was trying to express. Everyone wears a deathly
grey pallor (something to do with the picture’s existential import, reflecting
on miserable lives overburdened by commerce and the malaise that is the modern
world, no doubt), paralleling Andersson’s rigorous disinterest in engaging.
He’s known
for “characteristic absurdist deadpan and
surrealism”, which I can see, but it left me stone cold (Steve Austin). Great
visual compositions, granted, but A
Pigeon Sitting on a Branch, Reflecting on Existence isn’t nearly as
philosophically poignant, or cerebrally funny, as Andersson believes. That he’s
been referred to as a slapstick version of Ingmar Bergman sounds about right,
as I’ve frequently found his musings
a chore too (I know, I know the philistine in me is out in force in this
review). This is the kind of material I used to scoff at when I was a film
student, so it’s comforting to acknowledge I haven’t matured very much in the
intervening two decades.
