Absurdly, nothing happens
After half an hour of nothing happening, even a patient fan of hard-to-figure-out foreign art house movies is going to start going nuts when watching “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.”
Some people, especially those who awarded it a prize at the Venice Film Festival, have decided it’s a great movie, but those may be people who have not actually seen it.
“Pigeon,” tossed together by Swedish director Roy Andersson and every bit as screwy as its title, is a series of slow-paced absurdist set pieces that profess to riff on the weirdness of life but, instead, are just weird for the heck of it. Nothing happens and the nothing takes forever not to happen.
The film loosely follows the lives of two inept, deadly serious salesmen of joke store novelty items (Nils Westblom and Holger Andersson) as they try to unload a briefcase full of plastic vampire teeth. That sounds like it might be funny but it turns out not to be, like just about everything else.
The movie opens with a museum visitor staring at length at stuffed animals. Then a husband collapses from a heart attack while attempting to yank a stubborn wine cork. Following that, a ferry boat passenger dies after ordering a shrimp sandwich, a dance teacher feels up her student, a girl blows soap bubbles, the King of Sweden orders mineral water in a bar before heading off to war and a man talks on and on about missing a bus.
But wait, there’s more. A strapped-down ape in a laboratory screams when it receives electric shocks and a bedridden woman screams when her son tries to take away her jewelry. And an old man holds a pistol and contemplates suicide while blithely chatting on his cell phone. Stuff like that. Frequently, one character or another is heard to intone, with great solemnity, the catch phrase, “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine.” After the 10th time somebody says it, any self-respecting audience member is ready to have his own heart attack.
“Pigeon” is absurd all right, and it’s original, and it’s probably art of some sort. But folks who go to the movies for other reasons than that are going to want their $12 back. Being absurd only goes so far, and two hours is way too far.
Near the end comes the movie’s most controversial scene, as soldiers herd chained prisoners into a giant rotisserie drum, seal the door and light a fire underneath. A bunch of rich people watch the thing spin around from behind a picture window. The giant rotating chamber is emblazoned with the name “Boliden,” a Swedish mining company famous for environmental disasters. After that cheery bit of moviemaking, it’s back to the two vampire teeth salesmen.
The whole thing concludes with five strangers standing at a bus stop, debating at length whether it’s Wednesday or Thursday. After nearly two hours of “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence,” anyone who entered the theater on a Wednesday might wish for it to be Thursday, too.