Un pigeon perché sur une branche philosophait sur l'existence

This, a film about death; its stalking the unready, catching its survivors off guard, delivering problems of succession, needs to be viewed metaphorically. It plays out at a snail's pace and snares you just as death snares its victims. At first, we see the peaceful dove, AKA pigeon, protected by a glass bubble from the attacking eagle (örn) and get a sense of the portents to come. This comes to pass in a most inventive yet phlegmatic study of collective sorrow and fear of loss. Even if you know very little Swedish history, you cannot fail to recognise that the seemingly modern tale of two unsuccessful and troubled travelling salesmen is a metaphor for something else. Poor Jonathan wants never to meet his parents in heaven and is traumatised by visions of unspeakable horror. It is not just lost innocence. We get to see the dreams, the re-enactments of the glory days and the devastating defeat that lives on in the collective memory. Maybe he is a cry-baby. Maybe he has a true 'memory' of the extent of his, and his nation's loss. Quite magical but not your average cinema goer's fare.

Please, listen: if you are looking for a "classic" story you should choose something else. A story is here, indeed, but it's buried under a series of episodes and different POVs – it feels like we are having the chance to observe the behavior of the inhabitants of a parallel dimension from the fixed cameras of an internal surveillance video system (a very special one, equally able to look in the present, in the past and in the dreams of the strange characters displayed).

What we get, in the movie, it's a composite drawing of the social, private, and inner lives of those characters. And it's strange, of course: sometimes you can hardly tell the difference between the dream and the reality and the reverie – as those surveillance cameras never flinch and inch, even in front of the most strange happenings. But, even if the cameras never moves, the images we are shown constantly jump the tone of the story from drama, to comedy, to horror, to nonsense, with a quickness that is uncommon for the genre-related, petrified narrative codes we are used to.

The main thing I could understand, in the end, is that the problem of the people living in this world is their inability to care about each other's feelings. Some of them eventually even understand this, and with regret, because they realize that if you are not able to love your close ones then you will hardly be able to love yourself. Still, all of them look completely unable to go over this self-imposed limit: so it happens that the stuffed pigeon at the begin of the movie seems by far to be the most alive of the characters featured – not to mention the happiest one.

Some film makers try to make their films as realistic as possible (the Dardenne brothers, Mike Leigh), and some try to get as far away from reality as they can by creating their own cinematographic universe (Wes Anderson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). Roy Andersson definitely belongs to the latter category.

The world Andersson shows in his film, is grey, slow, unexciting, and old-fashioned. It reminded me of how eastern Europe must have looked during the communist era. No bright colours, no joy, no laughter, no hope, no ambitions. The interiors are drab, the people dreary. This self-created world is where the cinematographic equivalent of a series of short stories take place. Some are bizarre, most are melancholic, a few are incomprehensible, others meaningless or absurd. But they all share this common characteristic: they are taking place in Andersson's universe.

Actually, that universe is his studio, where he has built all of the sets with incredibly great attention to details, colours, clothing, lighting and lay-out. You can see fascinating images and footage of the production process on Andersson's web site. The sets are the real stars of the film. Even so much so, that maybe the stills of the film (also on the web site), with their Edward Hopper-like melancholy, are better than the film itself.

As fascinating as they are, I don't think the fragments work well as a feature film. They could have been very effective, say, as an element of a daily satirical television programme. But I think watching them all after each other, made into one 100 minute film, is not the best way to appreciate them.

This is my very first review here. I was so impressed that I was forced to register here and tell you all why nobody should miss the masterpiece.

This film pretty much summarizes how it feels to live in the world where 99% of people you deal with are imbeciles. In other words, it gives an accurate description of the state of the world right now. When you think carefully, you understand there is not that much difference between Apple Google whatchamacallit CEOs and those two guys of the film who work in the "entertainment business" and help people to have some good time. You look around and you see the bleakness of the film isn't an overstatement. It actually mirrors our reality in some most perfect manner. No one cares anymore. Nobody's listening anymore. We're tired, exhausted and uninspired. Some guys still make money and have some good laughs - but what's the point making any big fuss about it while the party's pretty much over and the world is doomed to be blown up sooner or later?! The last scenes are brilliant metaphorical statements of the western welfare societies and wrap up this instant classic fantastically.

Check this out and you'll see what I'm talking about, thanks.

Roy Andersson sits on a branch and looks at us: this is how we can summarize the film in one sentence. The movie is amusing, a sublime collection of "paintings" where the director cleverly moves from common situations (a mother enjoying his baby in a park) to the most absurd ones (King Charles XII having a mineral water in a bar before a battle). The viewer shall not struggle to find a standard, linear plot but, through putting together, one by one, all these paintings, she/he will have a reliable picture of human beings. Death, friendship, money, exploitation of people and animals: you find them all in Andersson's pigeon. Characters are mainly old, corpulent, pale, slow-moving but depicted in magnificent way and extremely real. The two salespeople involved in the entertainment business stand out: seeking debtors while not being themselves able to fulfill their obligations, they eventually realize that their friendship is the thing that really matters. Songs also play an important role in the movie (Lilla vackra Anna, above all) and they will stick in audience's head for a while after the viewing. At the end of his trilogy on human being, we can in fact say that the director has a positive message for us: Wednesday will come again and Roy Andersson is happy to see that we are doing fine.