magda_butra Pigeon is made in the same style as You, the Living. Again we have plenty of short scenes, shot from one angle, with no cuts. Filled with absurdity, no actual plot, various way of interpretation. Too deep or too obvious, Andersson bounces between two extremes. The characters and the scenes are overdrawn. Everything happens in one, slow pace. Silence is boring and dulling the vigilance. In comparison, You, the Living seemed more... lively.If Andersson shows Swedish society, I felt the criticism towards it in one scene, mocking it in the second and a direct reference to it in the third. The critique is present in a scene with elderly elegant Swedes observing the cruelty, done by non-Sweden. For me this is a reflection on Swedish neutrality in the 20th century. Mocking the Swedish society appears in the last scene. Bunch of people is waiting at the bus stop and one of the men starts to ask if today it's really Wednesday, cause for him it felt like Thursday. The group assures him that yes indeed, it's Wednesday. Additionally, the other man explains, that we all have to agree that it's Wednesday, otherwise there's gonna be chaos. Of course the first man did not imply that we wished it's another day of the week or that he is still gonna pretend it's not Wednesday. It did not hinder the other man to make sure that everything is clear - even if you feel like something else, you have to agree with everyone else in order to keep peace and organization. It might be exaggerated reference to Jantelagen (no one is special, no one should act like they are superior to one another). It is established that it's Wednesday, everyone has to adjust.And then it's my favourite scene with Charles XII. He, as a Swedish king, should be a clear indicator that Andersson tells something about Sweden. Okay, we have a king with absolute power, everyone serves him even if he has the most ridiculous demands. But... this could be any monarch, right? So for me by using him, the director was more about praising the modernization, understood both as moving from kingdoms to democracy and as equalization of the societies. Choosing Charles XII could simply just give Andersson space to mock king's homosexual needs, which was directly shown. Despite different possible interpretations, I admire Andersson for the technical management of this scene. It's the longest one in the movie and the most complicated. So many elements could go wrong and in the end there is this final version with no cut. Standing ovation.What if we look at Pigeon not as a portrait of Swedish life, but a life itself? All the feelings are phlegmatic. Even love, even anger, even laughter. Is the life so unfair or do we make it this way ourselves? I think that Swedish societ" is just a frame. Andersson is using some obvious cliches and stereotypes (which still can be true!) about his motherland in order to explain something more, something common to all human beings. Or I'm just trying to find deeper meaning which really isn't there. If so, this is just another proof of this director's strength - his movies can be seen through so many shades of interpretation.

maurice yacowar With its 39-episode fragmented structure and its absolutely unmoving camera, this Swedish film is a sweeping still life survey of modern daily life, like the Peter Breughel the Elder painting of hunters from which the title is drawn.The film is as ascetic in its monotones and monochromes as in its static camera. Writer/director Roy Andersson's title may have an additional reference: "En duva…" echoes the hilarious short 1968 parody that George Coe and Anthony Lover did of Ingmar Bergman's themes and aesthetics during his early prime. The new film's primary theme is the miseries of life, a hardy Bergman concern played more deadpan than anguished here. Andersson's spirit is playful and parodic. Several characters on the phone tell the people they're chatting with "I'm glad to hear everything is fine with you." But we see no joy on screen, except for the laughing diners in the restaurant that only emphasizes the unfortunate lonely army man's misery outside. Indeed the first fragment, the first of three Visits from Death, is a happy domestic scene in which, while the wife prepares dinner, humming in tune with the soundtrack, the husband tries to uncork a wine bottle and dies of a heart attack. The film eschews sentimentality. In the second episode three adults try to wrestle the treasure-trove handbag out of their dying mother's croaking grasp. Later, a maudlin song will depress salesman Jonathan with the idea that he will see his parents again in heaven. And they were nice to him.Jonathan and partner Sam are the two mainline figures. They try to "sell fun" but can't get buyers, can't get paid by the odd buyer they find, and therefore can't pay their suppliers. The film is rife with such deadpan deadbeats. The "fun" these men are offering are bathetic novelties: vampire teeth, a laughter bag and an Uncle One Tooth mask. In fact, bathos rules. Parodies abound, as in the several versions of Battle Hymn of the Republic. In the last episode, people waiting at a bus stop, a man stopping to refill his bike tires, another puzzled to learn that it's Wednesday, not Thursday, our daily lives are defined as trivial antitheses to heroism and meaning. As this man doesn't know where he is in the week, the film admits two historical intrusions, i.e., where are we in the larger movements of time? Both expand the characters' misery and emptiness to the larger state. Sweden is confronted with Jonathan's late-night philosophizing: "Is it right to use someone else just for your purpose?"In the first King Charles XII rides into a contemporary bar, leading his troops into valiant battle. Later he returns beaten, battered, broken by "the sly Russian" who apparently armed themselves without notice. The king has to wait for someone using the bar toilet. The second historical episode has a colonial troop herd chained and shackled black citizens, including women and children, into a huge copper drum, which as it rotates over a pool of burning oil kills them. This may be the dream Jonathan immediately reports, but it is still an allusion to a historic misdeed. The cylinder bears the name Boliden, the company whose sale of smelting to Chile in the 1980s led to charges that hundreds of citizens, including children, were poisoned by the waste site. As the film moves away from its first three death scenes, its overall movement might be defined as our denial of mortality. Those "fun" products are a bathetic summary of the diversions we seek in life to avoid recognizing our mortal limits. Hence the deaf man drinking on his stupor, the limping barmaid who sells the penniless a shot for a kiss, and all the sad characters Jonathan and Sam meet in their pathetic attempt to sell them fun. In that light the film may also reflect upon its own nature and structure and existence, that is, reflect upon the Swedish commercial film industry which — like any other nation's —provides empty anodynes to its sad citizens.

Qrobur In 1877 John Ruskin famously said of a painting by James Whistler that he was "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" when dismissing it as not being art.My reaction to this film is quite similar. Yes, it's a film in the sense that it's a sequence of scenes intended to be viewed on a screen. Also, I suppose Roy Andersson believes he's making an important point about something - the banality of Man's inhumanity to Man, perhaps - with it. However, the idea that a running joke that is not funny, is itself funny, is not funny; or, at least, it's not funny in Andersson's hands. This nominally absurdist film is turgid, mirthless and all but featureless. It's extremely slow-paced, deliberately so.Consequently, it seems to me that Andersson has made a kind of "anti-film" as a metaphor for people's lack of empathy for each other. In doing so, he has completely defeated his own purpose as it's likely none but a very small minority of people could find much of worth in such a boring (non-)film.Almost as if Andersson lost conviction in his approach, towards the end of this assemblage of flat scenes there is a pair that, although shot in the same low-key style, are nasty. It's hard to avoid the impression that Andersson thought he had better do something unsubtle to make his audience understand that he appears to draw some moral equivalence between an everyday lack of empathy between people and more heinous acts.So we come back to Ruskin; whatever this effort is, I don't think it's a film. Does it have some other importance? I don't think so.

HedgehoginPS If Ingmar Bergman had directed the Monty Python crew through a script by August Strindberg and story boards by Edvard Munch, this is the film that might have resulted. Billed as a comedy, it produces the occasional chuckle, but humorous it isn't. A surreal Nordic allegory, as suggested by other reviewers, it might possibly be, but one would have to sit through it several times to extract that degree of narrative intent. I think I wouldn't have the patience. One can imagine that Swedes would find it much more meaningful, and funnier, than Americans for possessing the cultural context upon which the film clearly depends. There are a lot of subtleties of history, social mores, and such that get lost in translation.One has to hope that the eponymous pigeon's existence is less dreary than the lives of the film's characters, or the writer's vision of the world. The DP and Art Director seem to have been a gleefully willing accomplices in the whole thing, however. The staging and photography are at times positively brilliant.