You, the Living

Often copied but never bettered, Roy Andersson is Sweden’s comic laureate of depression and the movies’ living master of the deadpan. Like his earlier Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living is a series of ingeniously twisted anecdotal sketches. The mundane miseries of modern existence are played out to uncannily funny effect through brilliant type-casting (often using non actors), arresting comic-book style composition and dead-on timing. A mordant connoisseur of drabness in architecture and interior design, Andersson conjures an urban purgatory out of the pokey, wan and non-descript. 

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