Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 341: Fri Dec 8

You, The Living (Andersson, 2007): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This 35mm presentation, as part of the Painted Skies season, includes an introduction by season curator Bruno Savill De Jong

Painted Skies is a film season celebrating fake backgrounds, spotlighting films with innovative set design that reminds us of their artificiality. This season was curated by Bruno Savill De Jong as part of the National Film and Television School (NFTS). Find more info at their website for Painted Skies and follow them on Instagram (@paintedsky_films) and Twitter (@paintedskyfilm).

Chicago Reader:
“Keaton-esque” hardly begins to describe this brutally deadpan comedy by Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs From the Second Floor), who seems to have translated the entire range of human misery into a loosely connected series of slapstick gags. His black humor is impressively layered, each layer darker than the last: when a joker at a family banquet insists on performing that old parlor trick of yanking the tablecloth out from under the dishes, he not only shatters a huge collection of crystal and china but also exposes a vintage dining table inlaid with swastikas. Andersson’s building block is a static long shot so solidly composed it suggests a panel in a comic strip; the central figure is often encased in his own suffering, and sometimes additional laughs come from a background figure surveying his despair in openmouthed bewilderment. I laughed so hard I hurt—or was it the other way around.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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