A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

The third part of Roy Andersson's Living trilogy, after Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, and the one that won him the Golden Lion at Venice in 2014 — the first Swedish film to take it since Bergman's day. Andersson builds every set in his Stockholm studio, shoots each scene as one static, deep-focus tableau, and takes years about it; this one took four.

Two salesmen, Sam and Jonathan, carry a briefcase of joke-shop merchandise from one indifferent customer to the next, insisting that they only want to help people have fun. The film is organised as thirty-nine scenes, some connected to them and some not, and the tone runs from bureaucratic farce to something genuinely disturbing — an eighteenth-century Swedish king riding into a modern bar, a colonial atrocity staged as an image the audience has to sit inside.

The performances are non-professional, the make-up is chalk-white, and nothing moves except within the frame, which makes the effect closer to Bruegel or Hopper than to conventional cinema. Critics were divided on whether the trilogy's method had exhausted itself; the jury was not, and the film has aged into the best entry point to the strangest body of work in modern Nordic film.