You, the Living (2007)
Directed by Roy Andersson
Though this film is set in Stockholm, it is universally germane; the fifty-plus vignettes of beautiful hysteria could have matured anywhere. Andersson uses his static camera to capture the weary, talentless and idle. Blighted by the familiarity of a tomorrow, the characters persevere (or do they?) alongside brass textures and dimmed azures, greens and browns. The devil-may-care sounds of the rollicking sousaphone are anything but insincere, though there is nary a smile in sight amid the jovial, booming soundtrack. The story is not in why we tell it, but how—and in the practical joke that is human existence, it seems no one except Roy Andersson is privy to the punch line. Samantha Vacca (June 12, 26, 7pm at the Museum of Arts and Design’s Andersson series)