✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Sweden, Germany, France · 2007
1h 35m
Director Roy Andersson
Starring Håkan Angser, Eric Bäckman, Patrik Anders Edgren, Björn Englund
Genre Drama, Comedy, Music
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
A collection of absurdist — and often ironic — vignettes accompanied by jazz music, all taking place in the city of Lethe, Sweden. These individual vignettes work together to form an artistic portrayal of both the bright and dark sides of human nature.
Andersson particularly delights in left-outs: the guy who can’t squeeze into the bus stop during a downpour; the natty little suitor getting his bouquet smashed in a slamming door. The sum total is the reflection of a worldview -- sad sack, bordering on “Everybody Hurts” black-velvet sad-clown bathos -- rather than any narrative.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.
Recalling the work of Jacques Tati, this is a grim but amusing and ultimately successful effort.
The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
You, the Living suggests that we would do well to discover the joy we find in each other that so often goes along with the pain.
Village Voice by Nick Pinkerton
You, the Living flips through 50-some single-panel vignettes, many very funny.
Slant Magazine by Nick Schager
Humor and sorrow are equally immediate emotions throughout, whether in the writer-director's traditionally structured setup-punchline scenes or his strange non sequiturs
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
There’s joy in watching a movie like You, the Living. It is flawless in what it does, and we have no idea what that is. It’s in sympathy with its characters. It shares their sorrow, and yet is amused that each thinks his suffering is unique.
You, The Living, if only by virtue of a more intimate scale than Songs, benefits from a lightness of touch and even a thin sliver of optimism in some sequences.
Andersson has a one-of-a-kind style that not all viewers will appreciate. His humor is not at all like Hollywood’s. His is leisurely and cerebral — two words never heard in La La Land.
Each of us is matched somewhere in the world by our exact double, someone who shares our thoughts and dreams.
A young man fights for his country.
Moments of truth
It’s not easy being human. Is a small slice of misery all we have?
When life loses its wonder, all it takes is one person who still believes in magic.
A cleaning woman discovers her new employer may have played a part in closing the factory where she worked for 20 years.
As he finishes his drug rehabilitation program, Anders wrestles with the past, and the possibility of a new life.
An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy that follows two traveling novelty salesmen.
A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local Medieval civilization find the path to progress.
When a reserved professor saves a woman from committing suicide, this sets off a chain of events that will change his life forever.
This is my life --- it is for you.
During a routine mission, soldiers are caught in heavy Taliban crossfire. In order to save his men, Claus makes a decision that will ultimately see him returned to Denmark accused of a war crime.
In 1950s London, a humorless civil servant decides to take time off work to experience life after receiving a grim diagnosis.