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Sweden, Germany, France · 2007
1h 35m
Director Roy Andersson
Starring Håkan Angser, Eric Bäckman, Patrik Anders Edgren, Björn Englund
Genre Drama, Comedy, Music
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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.
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