Masterful Nordic meltdown

>> Songs From the Second Floor sings a wicked tune

by JOANNE LATIMER

A film that forecasts doom, then delivers, is like payday for voyeurs of the Apocalypse. Songs From the Second Floor will satisfy everyone with a prurient interest in our collective downfall. It makes good on its promise for a capitalist meltdown when the bean counters screw us over and the priests forsake their flock.

Director Roy Andersson is known for making stylish television commercials that feed the market economy. He's Sweden's Joe Pytka, the creative peacock behind ads for IBM, Pepsi and Nike. Now Andersson has directed a film that will make his clients squirm. Songs From the Second Floor is like the alternative ending to Pytka's IBM commercial where the office workers can't fix the printer. In Andersson's film, the stock market crashes--not just the computer network--and the entire corporate structure fails. No one from Microsoft can fix it. Andersson, Europe's go-to guy for mass marketing, is alarmingly off message.

The film is a continuous string of vignettes, seemingly unrelated for the first 20 or 30 minutes. But stick with it. We're introduced to a failed businessman, his son, a poet in an asylum, a magician, an apathetic vicar, a mournful pack of stockbrokers who flagellate in the streets, an aged army colonel confined to a crib, and subway travellers who break into opera--the film's laugh-out-loud moment. The vignettes are barren, freeze-framed with no zooms, and Andersson is loath to let anyone speak. He keeps the skies overcast and the scenes under-lit. Actors wear gray makeup and walk around like zombies.

It's bloody bleak, but, as we're told, "it's hard to be a human being." It's even harder when the dead have risen and the traffic is jammed. Salvation is the only thing in demand and it can't be bought. In a clever twist, the commodification of salvation is Andersson's big theme here, as people attend an expo to buy and sell crucifixes. In one Fellini-esque scene, people strain to drag their carts of luggage across the airport, still clinging to the comfort of worldly goods. Their misery is entirely self-created, we see, and Andersson's characters have the gall to complain. Those who don't complain are mute with despair. Songs From the Second Floor finds a lot of wicked, black humour in that despair--and so will you.

Songs From the Second Floor opens Friday, July 20