About Endlessness
Dir: Roy Andersson (1hr 18mins) (12A)
★★★★★
A director whose work seems to have been “beamed from a parallel universe”, Roy Andersson made his name with the Living Trilogy – three feature films made up of absurdist sketches reflecting on the beauty and the tedium of human existence. Now, at 77, the Swedish film-maker has produced a postscript, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph.
About Endlessness features a priest who dreams of being crucified by his congregation, and a middle-aged man aggravated by an old schoolmate’s success. We see a father kneeling down to tie his daughter’s shoelace in the pouring rain; and a waiter ceremoniously opening a bottle of wine, only to spill it on the tablecloth. The effect is sad, sweet and “sublime”.
Andersson creates a world of tragicomic unreality with the vividness of a waking dream, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. He shows moments of all-too-human weakness, but there is also compassion, hope and love. In one “weirdly optimistic” sequence, an embracing couple floats above a devastated city in a Peter Pan-ish transcendence of disaster. Such moments make Andersson’s films “endlessly rewatchable”. They are all but impossible to describe to newcomers to his work, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times – but once seen, they are as “indelible as the wallpaper in your childhood bedroom”. Andersson is a film-maker with a painter’s eye, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, who splashes the mundane truths of existence across “a great, austere canvas”. Every choice here is precise and deliberate – and makes the film sing. Available on Curzon Home Cinema.