A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
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Roy Andersson (2014)
This, the third part of the Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson’s ‘living’ trilogy, is only the fourth feature he’s made since his first, A Swedish Love Story, more than forty years ago. During that time he’s also made a couple of shorts and continued to direct commercials. I’d not seen any of Andersson’s previous work so I was grateful to whoever decided to preface the screening of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence at Curzon Soho with a sample of his commercials. They manifested a deadpan-verging-on-cruel humour and a penchant for grotesquerie; both these things are, I gather, trademarks of Andersson the feature film-maker. (His satirical, absurdist comedy has led him to be compared with, among others, Luis Bunuel and Monty Python.) A Pigeon, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2014, is structured as a series of vignettes. The links between them are not all equally obvious but Andersson creates increasingly strong resonances through repetition and juxtaposition of images, themes and some of his characters.
The opening of the film finds a late-middle-aged couple in a natural history museum. The man is looking at a pigeon (the work of a taxidermist) in a glass cabinet. The woman stands on the threshold of the room. She’s carrying bags; her attitude suggests that she not only has no interest in the pigeon but also expects to be moving on soon enough for it not to be worth putting the bags down while she waits. There’s a third figure, in the background: the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex seems to be watching but this imposing memento mori is unnoticed by the human beings in the frame. The museum prologue introduces what’s described in an intertitle as ‘Three meetings with death’. In the first, a woman is preparing dinner in the kitchen, with her back to the dining room. She therefore doesn’t see a man, presumably her husband, struggle to uncork a wine bottle and suffer a fatal heart attack in the process. The second episode takes place in a hospital. As mercenary family members squabble round her deathbed, an old woman is anxious to be reassured that she’ll be able to take her handbag with her to the afterlife. In the third meeting, a man’s body lies on the floor of an eatery on a cruise ship. He is being attended to as other lunchers gawp. When it’s confirmed the man is dead, a waitress points out that the beer and sandwich which he’d just bought, and which sit implacably on a counter, are going spare. One of the onlookers says he’ll have the beer but not the sandwich.
These first sequences set the melancholy but dry-eyed register of Andersson’s existential comedy and presage in several other respects what’s to come. The images are mat; the palette is limited and muted; it’s not only the dead and about-to-be-dead characters who have an unhealthy pallor and whose physique tends to the comically misshapen. (These characteristics and the chequered floors which Andersson sometimes favours reminded me a little of the human figures and their settings in the work of the German artist Michael Sowa.) The prologue and the three meetings with death are presented in a very few long takes and the characters are at some distance from the camera. (The cinematography is by István Borbás and Gergely Pálos.) On the soundtrack there’s a continuing oompah tune: faintly recalling the accompaniment to the climactic dance in Otto e mezzo, the music suggests that, in the midst of death, life goes on. The beginning of A Pigeon also anticipates the dominance of indoor scenes throughout. I may be wrong but I scarcely remember seeing a sky during the film’s hundred minutes.
There are various motifs. Characters in several of the vignettes say on the phone, to an unseen interlocutor, ‘I’m glad to hear you’re feeling fine’ (and usually repeat the phrase). When a scene takes place in a bar or restaurant, it’s never empty but the customers give the impression of being isolated. (If they’re talking amiably to each other, their words are unheard.) Two of these sequences in bars feature the soldiers of Charles XII, the notoriously martial ruler of Sweden from 1697 to 1718. The first such scene, complete with military charger (whose rider has to duck to negotiate the entrance to the bar), stresses the gung-ho and misogynist behaviour of the soldiers as they head off to war. The second scene, which features the king himself, describes his army’s woebegone return: through the open door and windows of the bar, we see wounded and/or exhausted soldiers filing down the street and hear women wailing. Back in the present day and in contrast to the bellicose monarch, an elderly man in military uniform arrives for a succession of appointments that others haven’t kept and events that others have cancelled. Receiving the news on his mobile phone, the man seems always to reproach himself for the fact that things haven’t turned out as planned.
The two persistent presences in the film are Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holger Andersson). A Beckettian duo, they are also, and Jonathan especially, its most amusing and upsetting characters. Sam and Jonathan are continuously unsuccessful travelling salesmen, peddling novelty comedy merchandise, asking to be paid for the few sales they’ve made, receiving more aggressive demands from others for bills to be settled. Their unvarying sales pitch, freighted with the expectation of failure, offers vampire teeth (standard and extra length), ‘the classic’ laughing bag, and the ‘Uncle One-Tooth’ mask – ‘a new product in which we have a lot of confidence’. I’ve failed to give a sense of how unaccountably funny A Pigeon is; here’s one example to try and rectify that. Jonathan puts a record on a turntable; once the song it plays reaches a certain point he moves the needle back to the start of the record. (Modern music-playing technology really can’t, as a dramatic or comic device on screen, hold a candle to its antecedents.) Jonathan does this repeatedly and, when Sam asks why, explains that he doesn’t want to hear the bit when the singer looks forward to seeing his parents again in heaven. Sam asks if Jonathan didn’t like his parents or if they mistreated him. Jonathan says that, on the contrary, his parents were kind and he loved them but he can’t stand the prospect of a post-mortem reunion with them. ‘It won’t happen, will it?’ he anxiously asks Sam, who gives a characteristically dusty answer. This scene is very sad and very funny.
There are also two (I think just the two) quietly harmonious moments. Both express a simple ease and intimacy between two people – with, in one case, an animal getting in on the act. A middle-aged man and woman, beginning the day after (one assumes) spending the night together, look out of the window of their room and share a cigarette. (The man, at one point, is noticeably closer to the camera than almost anyone else throughout the film.) A younger man and woman prepare to make love on an otherwise deserted beach and a black dog settles down to sleep beside them. There are tower blocks in the far distance (and, I suppose, a sky …); any threat of conflict or violence seems likewise remote from this beach tableau. But black dogs also appear, later on, in the second of two upsetting sequences introduced by the intertitle ‘Homo sapiens’. (These form with the opening meetings with death, virtual bookends to A Pigeon.) First, a monkey is being used for some kind of laboratory experiment; the animal’s sounds and facial expressions signal fear and distress. Then we see colonialist English soldiers, accompanied by black dogs, hustling African natives into a large cylindrical metal drum, with ‘BOLIDEN’ stamped in letters on it[1]. The drum is set on fire and revolves, as if on a spit. The drum is reflected in glass doors that are opened to reveal elderly men and women, in evening dress, watching with mild interest and no sign of concern. Jonathan is the wine waiter to this gathering and he doesn’t share their nonchalance. The experience/dream appears to prompt another anxious question to Sam, back in the corridor of their hostel: can it be right to use other people only for one’s own pleasure? Sam makes no response other than to deride Jonathan, as he did the first time they appeared, as a cry baby. Their exchange prompts the concierge in the hostel to issue his usual admonition to the two men to keep the volume down because there are people in the building who need to be up for work early next morning. This is in spite of the fact that Jonathan and Sam aren’t making a lot of noise and there’s no evidence (yet) of other residents.
A Pigeon‘s title is picked up explicitly when, at a school poetry recital, a girl says that she’s going to read a poem about a pigeon reflecting that it ‘has no money’. A pigeon also returns in the final scene. Morning commuters gather at a bus stop (vindicating the warning words of the concierge?). The stuffed pigeon of the opening sequence is now replaced by a bird invisible to the cinema audience but whose audible cooing attracts the attention of the upward-gazing people at the bus stop. On a web site for the film, Roy Andersson has explained its inspiration and title as follows:
‘In [Brueghel’s] painting, Hunters in the Snow, the birds appear to be speculating: ‘What are the humans doing down there? Why are they so busy?’… A Pigeon Sat on a Branch consists of a bird’s panoramic view of the human condition, in which the bird not only reflects on human existence but also worries deeply about it, as I do myself. The pigeon is astonished that humans do not see an approaching apocalypse, though it is in man’s ability to avoid destroying the future for themselves [sic]. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch shows the looming apocalypse and offers the possibility to believe in our capacity to avoid it.’
The rather portentous flavour and the familiar import of Andersson’s words are fortunately different from the beguiling tone and originality of what he’s put on screen. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is a poetic film, emotionally coherent in effect even when you’re not sure what you’re responding to.
30 April 2015
[1] Boliden is a town in Sweden and New Boliden is, according to Wikipedia, ‘a Swedish mining and smelting company focusing on production of copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver’.