You, The Living (Du Levande)

Over nearly four decades, Swedish master stylist Roy Andersson has directed just four features. While cinephiles were forced to wait almost twenty-five years for his 2000 chefd’æuvre, Songs from the Second Floor, we have been granted the visionary You, the Living after a wait of only seven. A plot synopsis is impossible, unless one could easily summarise a highly subjective and darkly witty series of fifty portraits of the human race at our present moment in history. For his own part, Andersson has described the film as a “mosaic of human destinies” on the theme of “how to behave around others.”

We meet a girl with a desperate crush on a rock guitarist, businessmen, housewives, criminals and, of course, drunks at the bar. They drift in and out of dreams and waking; their attempts at communication are doomed to be emaciated or thwarted. But Anderson’s intense empathy is at the core of it all, no matter how outrageous or sombre the situations, no matter how grey and grubby his distinctive palette. You, the Living is a triumph of tragicomedy from one of the cinema’s most sardonic imaginations.

Dimitri Eipides, Toronto Film Festival Programme