After seeing Andersson's You, the Living last fall (a movie that I liked very much), I wanted to go back and see this earlier movie.
They're certainly the work of the same director -- the same visual style, with an unmoving camera; the same bleak, gray city; the same series of vignettes in lieu of plot -- and you'll enjoy (or hate) them both in about the same amount.
If anything, the setting for Songs is even bleaker than that of Living, as Andersson's unnamed gray city is in the grip of an unspecified economic crisis, and people seem to be fleeing the city, causing unbreakable traffic jams in some neighborhoods. We have a protagonist of sorts (though still nothing that really adds up to a plot) -- a furniture salesman who has torched his own store, and struggles to bear up under the steadily increasing weight of daily existence.
It's a comic nightmare in which the apocalypse may not have arrived just yet, but it seems to be just around the corner, and the sense of dread gives us moments that are horrific, hilarious, and poignant, often in the same instant. Imagine a collaboration between Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin, and you start to get a sense of Andersson's sensibility.
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