Rate It
|
||||||||||||||||
Rating Averages
My Friends |
Not rated. () |
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
All Flixster |
(1334) |
516 |
2850 |
Female |
(409) |
158 |
875 |
Male |
(925) |
358 |
1975 |
More Like This
If you liked this, then you'll also probably like...
Got another recommendation for someone who liked this movie? Add it to the list!
Got an opinion? Use the buttons to vote on all the suggestions people have added.
If lots of people vote, the best suggestions will rise to the top.
| You, The Living (Du levande) (100%) |
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) (20%) |
|
|
| Playtime (100%) |
|
|
Plot:
While it falls squarely into the precious category of love-it-or-leave-it art-house oddities, the hypnotically absurd Swedish comedy Songs from the Second Floor is certainly unlike any other mo...( read more 
)
Photos
Meet Other Fans
My Friends Said...
Songs From the Second Floor Recent Reviews
Register or sign-in to see your friends' reviews !
Recent Reviews
-
MCT:November 14, 2008One i've been sitting on for a while, because it never felt quite like the right time to watch this. Well, today was the right time. Astonishing movie. Could not be more relevant to this moment.
-
MCT:August 14, 2008
This is really the oddest film. I don't mean bizarre but it was odd in its cuts, in its repetitiveness and even in its acting. The comedic elements were strong here, there was amazing depth to the characters and I could see a lot of visuals which had a lot of care taken to be made. Everything from the female sacrifice to the last scene, odd and strange yes, but the atmosphere of dull, monotonous, modern concrete creations was stunning, it made it very enjoyable and yet brought full depth to the movie. I can't help it, I enjoyed this fully.
-
MCT:August 6, 2008Without naming the greyish, ghoulish, dull city, one evening a series of absurd occurrences take place there: an uncaring boss , while lying in a gym's tanning machine, orders his servile chief executive to downsize and sack a longtime obedient clerk as redundant, who when fired can't accept his misfortune and reacts by degrading himself; a lost foreigner is violently beaten by passing young thugs just for asking where to locate someone, as the bystanders on a busy street just watch without helping; a magician makes a critical error by sawing deeply into the stomach of an audience volunteer in his sawing-a-man-in-half act; and, the town for no explainable reason comes to a grinding halt in a massive traffic jam and is also experiencing a catastrophic crash in the stock market signaling the possible end to world capitalism.
The main character is a portly, elderly, tired furniture showroom owner Kalle , who has snapped without cause and burned down his business to collect the insurance money. He's despondent and still walks around with his face covered in soot, as he meets his younger struggling son Stefan in an empty restaurant. He's mainly despondent because his older son Tomas wrote poetry until he went nuts and is now catatonic in an mental institution, where he visits and goes berserk because Tomas just stares without recognizing him or saying anything.
There are a few more absurdly comical vignettes. The most striking is a visit by uniformed soldiers to a former army general they served under, who is celebrating his 100th birthday in a luxury nursery home. The frail old timer is sitting up in a hospital crib with a bedpan under him as if imprisoned, while the doctors are expounding to the nurses about his enormous wealth. When a speech is delivered the senile general gives his best wishes to Hermann Göring and offers a Nazi salute. In another scene meant to disgrace the main character even more so, Kalle encounters a former business acquaintance, Sven, in the form of the 'walking dead'?a suicide from whom he borrowed money-- and in a conversation, he relays that he's really glad he's dead because he doesn't have to repay him. Perhaps the film's signature vignette, where it brings despair to the fullest, involves some corporate bigwigs dressed in robes who decide that the way to save themselves and their world of capitalism is by going through a religious-like sacrifice of a young woman. Afterward they sourly meet at the Grand Hotel content to tell themselves they did everything they could to save the world, even offering a ritualisitic sacrifice of the younger generation.
The film argues that Western civilizations' hopes are derived from its economic system and not from its religious beliefs, and if that system failed its citizens they would be left without hope. It's a strangely amusing film and offers to the willing viewer a slice of absurdist Nordic surrealism. Its main problem is that it can't sustain its gimmicky idea throughout, and the 40 or so vignettes all lead to the same kind of apocalyptic insanity and to a sophomoric kind of Beckett-like exchange over humiliation. The film can be best judged in how provoked the viewer was by it as a genuine oddity. Though I didn't find it a masterpiece, I was more than delighted with its comical pronouncements and its overall effect. By DENNIS SCHWARTZ. -
MCT:July 3, 2008
Strangely cold & bitter & I mean it when I say strangely, Loneliness, vulnerability, social breakdown & ... Looks like a warning , Anyway has some great scenes
-
MCT:June 27, 2008
Songs From The Second Floor, is the second feature from director Roy Andersson, whose spent his career making according to fellow swedish director and legend Ingmar Bergman, "The best commercials in the world"(Youtube his name for proff of this). And...(read more)erson takes an advertisers eye to this film and inverts it, into around 40 or 50 short vignettes, some with recurring characters, like the man seen on the cover who has burned down his buisness to collect the insurance but bumbled the job, while most include walkons, and many characters drift in an out of scenes before the movie ends. These short vignettes are nearly all deadpan and absurdist tragi-comic advertisments for peoples lives broken or on the verge of breaking. The antagonist, if there must be one, is capitalism(a subject which the commercial making Anderson is very much aware), and it's de-humaizing effects on all its touches. As bleak as all this sounds, the material is played more often than not for laughs. There's a traffic jam which has clogged the city as if everyone were leaving at the same time, a girl who is blindfolded and lead of a cliff by her village elders, a man accidentally sawed in half by poor magician, men and women in buisness suits walk down streets in paradees flailing themselves as an act of pennance to God so he will prevent the further falling of stocks, and a man followed around by ghosts of freinds and strangers. If that werent enough each scene is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. The movie could be considered a tragi-comic funeral song for western capitalism and modernity(the film takes place just before the new millenium I think), but a tag like that really doesn't communicate how humane, clever, funny, and acessible this movie really is. It's like a lyrical Monty Python film, or a an absurdist Ingmar Bergman, and yet again it's a film all it's own, structurally, conceptually, and aesthetically, if your interested in where film-making may be going in the future and right now, Songs From The Second floor, is the movie to see, and one of the best of the new millenuim
Comments
This board looks lonely. Be the first to talk about "Songs From the Second Floor" !
