Roy Anderson's film is slow, surreal and depressing. This should not be
necessarily bad - slow, surreal and depressing can be many things. It can be
lyrical, as in Bela Tar's "Werkmeister Harmonies". it can be
extravagantly visual, as in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen". It
can even bask in the artzy-schmartzy glow of its creator and its own creation
(Lynch's "Erasurehead"). "Songs from the Second Floor"
shares all of the above, but it does not do so in a sufficient level to make
the viewing rewarding. in many ways this movie hit me in all the wrong
directions as it dampened my already soaking wet spirits – it might be the case
that such "no redeem is possible" films should only be seen in a good
mood.
On the upside the serious lack of lackluster might be balanced by
Anderson's cinematic language. Anderson has a very acute understanding of
spatial relations and unlike many others he succeeds in making the 2D screen
seem very 3D, not just in terms of visual data but also emotionally. The scenes
are not merely crafted – they are in a very concrete way sculpted. The closest
match to this visual tinkering would have been "Erasurehead" had not
Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle presented a much more adequate match with its
strong emphasis on spaces. What all these "creations" have in common
is the painstaking realization of a "mood", a feeling, a single
headstrong director aims at and achieves in an "epic" production. In
this sense the film is a realization of "being Roy Anderson" as much
as it is about anything else.
Surprisingly this film has a host of critics hailing it. It was even
called "Bergman meets Monthy Python". As for me - I didn't quite see
how this would be the right description. It is not, despite what people say,
funny (and I guess that that's what the critic meant), and Monthy Python have
always dealt with death and God. I guess that the allusion specifically
addressed a scene where a man is being sawed into two by a magician and starts
yelling and needs to be taken to a hospital to be stitched up. This might have
been "Pythonesque" had the man been amputated, or
"Bergmanessque" had he simply died. But it is neither. He suffered.
Small pains but none that could be called heroic, pains that lead to despair
more than anything else.
It is the dear sister Despair, as depicted in Gaiman's Sandman series
that this movie hails as its master - apathy, inconvenience, static states. In
another scene a salesman buys some large plastic crucifixes in order to make a
killing in the pre-millennial angst ridden market. When the deal is done he
says that he "has a cross to bear", and indeed in the following
sequences we see him trudging through the plot with a large paper wrapped crucifix.
It is in this bodily, overly concrete no-place-for-allegory state that this
movie dwells – despair is not "pain" as such. It is the negation of
meaning or transcendence. Yet in the few sequences that have the score rising
from the background we are made to remember that despair's twin sister is
desire and that the two, as the Socratic insight goes, cannot be separated.
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