Master Filmmaker Roy Andersson Drops the Deadpan for His Poignant, Powerful About Endlessness

What’s confusing at first about Roy Andersson’s latest is that it’s not very funny. Known for his wry deadpan—he’s a master at crafting absurdist humor out of seemingly banal situations—the acclaimed Swedish writer-director, who turned 78 last month, is noticeably in a far less jocular mood for About Endlessness. You can find stray chuckles in this slim, quietly moving treatise on the utter futility of everything, but the laughs are overshadowed by the somber realization that Andersson’s typically bereft characters are left to their own devices even more so than usual. Rather than punchlines, we get glimpses of melancholy lives stuck in limbo.
The Best Direction winner at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, About Endlessness finally arrives in the U.S. carrying far less buzz than Andersson’s previous film, 2014’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which won the top prize at that year’s Venice. In a sense, A Pigeon perfected Andersson’s storytelling trademarks—the static camera, the single-shot tableaux, the sad/funny vignettes—that he’d first introduced in Songs From the Second Floor and You, the Living, and as such felt like both a culmination and a bit of a dead-end. About Endlessness doesn’t appear to be that much different than Andersson’s earlier movies, but its tone is more funereal and compassionate. The people we meet aren’t oddballs or objects of derision—they’re struggling too much to be merely “quirky,” and Andersson’s heart goes out to them, even if he doesn’t give them a happy ending. (Truth is, most of them don’t get an ending at all.) If before you marveled at his tightly choreographed dioramas, here you look beyond the stellar precision of his filmmaking. The human beings are front and center.
As usual, there isn’t much of a through-line to About Endlessness as we drop in on several individuals over the course of the film’s 70-minute running time. A few of them will pop up again later in the movie, but for the most part we get in and get out, gaining only a snippet of information about their lives. We meet a dentist (Thore Flygel) who, for unknown reasons, is having a bad day. A pair of lovers (Tatiana Delaunay and Anders Hellström) fly silently over a bombed-out city, wrapped in an embrace that’s more protective than warmly romantic. A priest (Martin Serner) has dreams of being crucified. A woman gets off a train, expecting that no one will be there to pick her up. A defeated army trudges through the snow to a prison camp. A man holds a dead, bloodied woman, a knife in his hand. Did he kill her or just stumble upon the crime?