YOU, THE LIVING

The poignant and darkly hilarious films of Swedish director Roy Anderson are renowned for taking him an enormously long time to fund and produce. His latest, You, The Living was eight years in the making, with the funding coming from 18 different organizations. With an extraordinarily vivid visual style, it offers a potent portrait of relationships, life and lifelessness in the modern world. It’s comprised of fifty single-take sketches, snapshots and vignettes, any of which could be enjoyed in isolation ‘ some of which are poetic genius. For nearly every brilliantly composed shot the camera is static, giving the impression that these are photographs or paintings coming to life, and allowing us to examine all the details of the elaborately built sets and the background action. Bathed in a distinctive greeny-grey wash, the characters are in a world resplendent with drabness, and appear unable or unwilling to engage with anyone on a human level. The are stuck in their own unhappy, insular worlds ‘ like the man walking his dog, unaware that he’s dragging it on its back; the woman having sex with a man who talks the whole time about his failing retirement fund; or the man running furiously on a treadmill who can’t hear his young son calling out to him. The people in this world are blighted by selfishness, and their cruelty is closely linked to their loneliness. It’s an underlying message throughout that is laid bare by the worn out psychiatrist who remarks with exasperation, ‘people demand to be happy at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish and ungenerous.’ There’s no point trying to make a mean person happy, he says to the camera, ‘these days I just prescribe pills, the stronger the better.’ A brilliant and moving film. (Amelia Groom)