To me, this movie is perfection.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

You will learn few things about what cinema (and you) can be until you learn to train and practice your perception against the flux of images, and this means to be the still point from which everything else is viewed to be in motion, letting it be what it is as it makes its journey to reach you.This is comic, at first sight, tragic, about modern alienation, failure, ego, compromise, desperation. People die. Lose their pension fund. Lose love. All for no real reason that we see of so just the way life strikes us most days. A gloom because it's all faced dead-on, simply the pain without story-drama that justifies. The same as his previous film except a little lighter even, with actual songs this time.But if you are still long enough, then what? A woman sings in a funeral about a next world without grief, loss, want. But of course the funeral itself like every other vignette here is not filmed to sadden or crush. There is a distance here from which all this gloom is filmed which is the distance in which whatever real grief, loss, want, we would normally perceive in these lives (say, in a melodrama) evaporates as if absorbed by the dingy walls.The same woman repeats the song a little later but now casually in a bathtub, her husband is putting on a shirt in the background, a window looks out to bright day. There is a routine in what we do, yes. Elsewhere characters measure a carpet, rehearse their bass drum for parade, shake hands for a business meeting. They all look like they haven't had a good day in years, none of them a hero, all of it inglorious. But just what of all this we see isn't a world without grief, loss, want? Characters suffer, or seem to, but do we as we watch? The whole thing was like a breeze of air lifting human pettiness and desperation and showing them to be flimsy curtains that can flutter and let air and light through rather than just hang.Where you put in life to always have a lover or a pension fund? If any of these go, like the guitarist lover the girl searches for, they have been returned. Something lingers in the air, a beautiful dream here of a moving house. And when you are negligent of the 200 year old china that you smash trying to perform an impossible tablecloth trick because it was a boring dinner-party (a hilarious moment in the film), does anything prevent you, if it comes to that, from taking punishment with the same smile as part of only another absurd game?Some poignant satire, but even better, the mind that would fret and despair over suffering is not here, a stoic mind is.A marvelous image encapsulates this worldview, a brass band is rehearsing in an empty room, one of them is standing before huge windows playing his clarinet while outside a storm is heard booming and roaring. We are small, yes, and the outside is vast. But what prevents him from playing his music against the storm? If something does, he will stop then.

Some people are happy with a Matt Damon thriller, as well they might be; some folks want a weeper, a well-made tear-jerker like Hachi, which is well and good. Those of us who have lived long enough and seen enough films sometimes crave a new approach, not merely for newness itself, but because the challenge of a new viewpoint, the exposure to a cinema world unlike any other, is often fascinating and fulfilling.In his time, Griffith did created a new vision, as did Fellini, or Bergman, or Bunuel, most of their films not always huge at the box office, but leaving a mark simply because they changed the way people look or thought about things. Roy Andersson does just this, painting an extraordinary world without a conventional plot line, without the usual throbbing soundtrack, without even professional actors--but if you allow yourself an immersion into his strange, lonely world where all those folks suffer miserably like so many other desperate souls, you will experience something in its own way like Chaplin and Keaton, often weirdly hilarious and sometimes terribly sad. Andersson's world is distinctively unusual, sometimes appearing static and monochromatic, often springing briefly to live only to sputter out suddenly, leaving the viewer contemplating what might have just been before being taken into the next field, the next room, the next life. Both distressing and oddly hopeful, experiencing Andersson's You, The Living and it's match, Songs From The Second Floor is unlike any ordinary narrative but vividly memorable.

This film restores your faith in film making.The director takes what appears to be simple moments in life and displays them as cinematic voyeurism , principally of ourselves.They say to express something simply in art is one of the hardest things to do however the director gives us a lesson in austerity. The end result is a mirror of our day to day existence and perhaps the banality of it or for the optimists.. the beauty.Some scenes capture moments in life that would pass the observer by without a second thought however when seen on the screen it gives a whole new meaning to existence and the futility of the day day to progress of ordinary lives.

This film is an exquisite exploration of the human condition. What makes us human and holds us all together is sometimes more important than the surrounding events that are taking place. This is the main premise for You, the Living, as we enter a peculiar world filled with grief, loneliness, and sadness. The film is set up as a staged performance. The camera rarely moves and the subjects are almost always sitting completely still and simply narrating or doing some other seemingly out of place action. When I first watched this movie, the first few scenes were something that I had never experienced before in my movie going past. I tried to figure out the genre of the film, but as more and more scenes went by the purpose of the scene construction became more and more clear. We enter into a dream like state. Everything in the movie when picked apart individually seems to be rather normal. But we still get a sense that there is just something off about the whole film. The timing is a bit awkward. People's interactions with one another are just a bit off. People's actions are out of place. What then can we say is the driving force behind the movie? There isn't a central plot to hold on to; we skip around to different characters that all end up in some way having interactions with each other. This strengthens the sense of dreaminess about the film as frequently you might have several seemingly disconnected dreams in a night but there is one thing that ties them all together. The construction of this film, when viewed in this way is extraordinary. You need the whole film to know what is going on. The film plot and story are not being acted out by actors, but rather the editing and the scenes themselves. You can look at just about any scene individually and write the movie off as almost being completely insane. A long shot of a man playing a tuba? A long hall with people standing on chairs and singing? People shopping for carpet to only have the clerk break down and pour out his heart about his marriage? These are all things weave together to address what we all feel as people. What we dream about, good, bad, rewarding is captured by this film. For example, we have a middle eastern barber who shaves the head of an arrogant customer. Anyone who works in a customer service industry knows what it is like to deal with pushy customers all day and how good it would be to just to act out. Another example would be the carpet salesman who all of the sudden went on a long rant about his wife. Or the Prominent man of the community who was interrupted before an important speech by his son asking for money. What about the old man who was sent to the electric chair because he broke his wife's dishes? These things when paired with the dreamy filming of the film make you question that perhaps the events that take place are simply internal anxieties that manifest themselves in the world. Perhaps that is what Andersson is saying about the human condition. Maybe our deepest anxiety is that we are truthful with one another and, in the words of the characters in the film, "nobody understands." Overall, this is a very strong film. It is a film that is unique from any other film that I have seen previously. As you watch you are memorized by the oddity that each scene takes on. Previous film techniques are almost forgotten. We have very little movement, almost no action, and the camera remains still throughout. On top of that the plot doesn't exist. Instead we are left with small episodes that offer little to no resolution of the problems they present. In each scene only the main character of interest truly "acts." The rest of the people present simply have little to no reaction to what is going on with that character. As such this is a film about lonely people who are desperately trying to seek out and connect with others. Some people will not like this movie. People looking for a typical Hollywood experience should stay far away from this film. However, if you go into the film with an open mind and stick with the film to truly find out what the film is about it is an absolute delight. It is quirky, witty, funny, and sad. Most importantly it reminded me of just how versatile film as an art form truly is. I would say that it is probably the most memorable and inspiring movies that I have seen.