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About Endlessness (Roy Andersson, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-10-01 03:06:39 +0000 UTC
In its own strange way, About Endlessness feels like an epilogue to Roy Andersson's grand trilogy, which in part explains its somewhat abbreviated running time. Where his last film, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, ended with some of the most blatant cruelty we'd yet seen in Andersson's work -- the artist clearly understood the general direction in which the world was heading -- About Endlessness exudes a kind of beatitude even in its saddest moments.
The films of the trilogy seemed to address folly and horror from an immanent position, inside the human world. ("The second floor," after all, is the living world, positioned between heaven and hell.) But Endlessness operates quite literally on another plane. Here, Andersson is asking us to observe his pitiable Swedes from a God's eye view. How else to explain the floating, angelic presences at the start of the film, or the nondiegetic narrator who captions nearly every vignette by telling us how she "saw" them?
So in a way, About Endlessness is Andersson's version of Wings of Desire, except there is no chance of gods or angels giving up their celestial perch to take up residence in this mess. Apart from the major throughline of the priest (Martin Serner) who has lost his faith -- a problem that a totally-administered society has no time for -- there is a complete lack of narrative progression in this film. One could take it as a formal return to Andersson's commercial-advert style, or a series of short films yoked together under a general theme. But his title is a clue: this is a film that could conceivably go on forever.
That's to say, these nonevents are happening in a perpetual present, or a holy simultaneity. This is Godly time, not human time. We are witnessing these moments as concatenated, since that is all that cinema could really do. But we are intended to experience them not as sequential but as a core sample of humanity. What the Godly voice of the woman narrator sees is precisely what we see, so we are sharing God's vision.
And it is a mixed bag. There are pleasant surprises. (The woman at the train station thinks she's been forgotten, but her man is just running late.) There are minor annoyances with relatively little consequence. (A man has engine trouble.) There are sparks of hope. (The boy on the street will apparently see the plant-misting shopgirl again.) But there is also loneliness and pettiness and, in the single most harrowing shot in the film, honor killing committed in the name of a God who looks on with pity and bemusement. As Andersson shows, such an act is mourned by God, but then She moves on. Each of us is barely a comma in a never-ending prose poem.
