The title was enough to get people talking, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence has become one of the hits of the Venice Film Festival.
Swedish director Roy Andersson’s film is a series of surreal, bleakly comic vignettes that mix the mundane with deadpan humour and unthinking cruelty. Wandering through the film are two sad-sacks who sell vampire teeth and other jokey novelties. They’re the least jolly salesmen imaginable, and no one is buying.
The movie had audience members laughing and scratching their heads in equal measure on Tuesday. The Guardian newspaper called it “a glorious metaphysical burlesque,” while the Daily Telegraph called Andersson’s work “sublime, ridiculous” and untranslatable.
Andersson said he wanted to explore the cruelty humans are able to inflict on one another, and how it persists down the ages. The movie is set in a drab corner of modern Sweden, but the country’s 18th-century King Charles XII and his army burst into proceedings.
“I hope that people can see that daily life can also be poetic even when it’s banal,” Andersson said. “That’s my ambition — that banal life can also be poetic.”
The film, which took four years to make, is shot with a static camera in a series of deep-focus tableaux.
Andersson, 71, said he was inspired by the social vision of painters including Peter Brueghel and Otto Dix to abandon the traditional narratives of his early films for the fragmented vignettes of this film and its predecessors You, the Living and Songs From the Second Floor.
“I don’t tell stories. I want to make pictures,” he said. “It’s boring for me to look at cinema with stories.”
Some have compared Andersson to the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. But he sees one essential difference.
“As I see it, Ingmar Bergman had no humour.”
