Beginning with a dream of bombs falling from the sky, ending with the blank vision of the apocalypse, and filling the space between with the story of human disconnection. “You, the Living” is a film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self- confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved. The emotions range from the gloom of a daughter attempting to communicate with an Alzheimer’s patient to a young woman’s obsessive dream about marrying a handsome guitar-player named Micke to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers. While there isn’t a continuous narrative, similar themes of greed and desperation appear in several sketches. The first of these sketches features two overweight individuals and their little dog sitting on a park bench, the woman deploring the fact that no-one understands or loves her, whilst blithely ignoring her husband’s comforting and reassuring words. 

In a nightmare, a man attempts the old tablecloth trick at a family gathering and predictably brings the antique crockery crashing to the ground. As a result, he ends up being sentenced to the electric chair, the horror aggravated by his judges drinking pints of beer in court and the fact that the family dinner table is decorated with swastikas. The lack of music emphasises the awkwardness of the scene, not only because of the destroyed porcelain, but because of the host family’s table which highlights Switzerland’s openly pro-Nazi past. Andersson also uses heavy amounts of irony during sequences, such as during an executive luncheon, one man tells another on the phone that his workers don’t appreciate quality and how nice it is to appreciate money and the things that it can buy, such as fine wines. When he is not looking, however, a man at an adjacent table calmly lifts his wallet from his jacket on the back of his chair. Though Andersson’s cynicism is at times not very well hidden, “You, the Living” has an underlying humanism that shows compassion for the human condition. 

This film is a cautionary tale that looks at the mess we humans have gotten ourselves into but suggests there is still time to turn it around, if we heed the warning of the poet Goethe that opens the film, “Be pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.” The theme tying these sketches together is that our time on Earth is limited and “tomorrow’s another day’, so let’s treat each other with kindness. The film is a series of fifty-odd sketches, snapshots and vignettes filmed with a static camera and often no music. “You, the Living” has an astonishing visual style. The same washed-out, pale-green colours recur throughout, and there is never a shadow in sight; this makes the characters appear exceptionally pallid and creates the sense that human life is being laid bare for examination. Almost every scene is captured within a static camera frame, as if they are photographs being brought to life and the few occasions where the camera does move are all the more unusual. In the most intense moments of longing and despair, the characters transfix the viewer by directly facing the camera – they know that they are being examined and have a few moments to pour out their hearts to us. 

Beginning with a dream of bombs falling from the sky, ending with the blank vision of the apocalypse, and filling thespace between with the story of human disconnection. “You, the Living” is a film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self- confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved. The emotions range from the gloom of a daughter attempting to communicate with an Alzheimer’s patient to a young woman’s obsessive dream about marrying a handsome guitar-player named Micke to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers. While there isn’t a continuous narrative, similar themes of greed and desperation appear in several sketches. The first of these sketches features two overweight individuals and their little dog sitting on a park bench, the woman deploring the fact that no-one understands or loves her, whilst blithely ignoring her husband’s comforting and reassuring words. 

In a nightmare, a man attempts the old tablecloth trick at a family gathering and predictably brings the antique crockery crashing to the ground. As a result, he ends up being sentenced to the electric chair, the horror aggravated by his judges drinking pints of beer in court and the fact that the family dinner table is decorated with swastikas. The lack of music emphasises the awkwardness of the scene, not only because of the destroyed porcelain, but because of the host family’s table which highlights Switzerland’s openly pro-Nazi past. Andersson also uses heavy amounts of irony during sequences, such as during an executive luncheon, one man tells another on the phone that his workers don’t appreciate quality 

Sweden 2007 

Director: Roy Andersson 

With: Jessika Lundberg, Elisabeth Helander and Bjorn Englund. 

Certificate 15, 92 minutes.