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Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson, Torbjorn Fahlstrom, Sten Andersson, Lucio Vucino ... see more see more... , Hanna Eriksson , Peter Roth , Tommy Johansson , Sture Olsson , Bengt Carlsson

Songs From the Second Floor, which shared the Special Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, is an indescribably surrealistic examination of the pointlessness of modern life in a nameless city f... read more read more...ull of directionless people. Throughout a series of unrelated vignettes, all marked by absurd black humor, the film's characters stand witness to an utterly motionless traffic jam, the pathetic firing of a 30-year employee, a magic trick gone horribly wrong, and the failed business ventures of a crucifix salesman. Dialogue is largely absent from the film, and even where present, it usually only confounds what little expository quality there is in the narrative. The tone of Swedish director Roy Anderssen's highly original and challenging project recalls such bleak visionaries as Samuel Beckett and Luis Buñuel, and though it certainly perplexed audiences, it also left them laughing uncontrollably. ~ Derek Armstrong, Rovi

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89% liked it

6,067 ratings

Critics

88% liked it

34 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 37 min.

Directed by: Roy Andersson

Release Date: July 3, 2002

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DVD Release Date: March 23, 2004

Stats: 449 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (449)

  • brooklynspo
    January 15, 2008
    brooklynspo
    I would have love to have seen this on a big screen. I am sure I missed a lot of detail in Roy Anderson's meticulously crafted tableaux on my 27' Sony.
  • 5oclockcoffee
    September 16, 2011
    5oclockcoffee


    The first impression I had watching "Songs From the Second Floor" was of a collection of life metaphors boxed in a surrealistic shape. A slight discomfort. Later on, some scenes insisted on coming back to mind and they amazed me in their simplicity/originality/reality. Bl... read moreessed be the one who sits down.

    This quote is from the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, whose poem "Stumble Between Two Stars" inspired Roy Andersson´s film. "Vallejo created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms. No facile trend setter, Vallejo forged a new discourse in order to express his own visceral compassion for human suffering." Even if it´s not that difficult to be digested, pretty much the same can be said about Andersson´s film that succeeds in portraying Vallejo´s imaginary and our modern and "complicated" human condition.

    - How are you?
    - What can I say? It's not easy being human.

    Life is hard to everyone. But is it really that bad?
    After sacrificing "the youth", a man drinks and throw ups, drinks again and throw ups. A woman on the floor can't get back up on her stool. It´s easier to keep drinking than to sit down*. Or in Michael Thomson ´s words in a review to BBC, "all activity is pointless". Pointless such as the perhaps obvious, but still great scene at the airport where several people push overloaded trolleys, piled high with towers of luggage.

    There's a time for misery. But it'll soon be over. Only a few more yards and we'll have left this damned dump under the clouds for good.

    Obvious or not, we go through life carrying lots of unnecessary things and we´ll still try to take them with us when it comes the time to reach the second floor.


    *Of course this is not what the scene means; it is just an analogy I made with "sits down" meaning to stop and think on what causes you pain.




  • kiriyamakazou
    January 28, 2011
    kiriyamakazou
    I loved some of the ideas presented here, but not so much the cold and empty execution. This is no fault of the film. It is just such a bizarre offering that its last concern is the audience. The film focuses on a bizarre city where time seems to have come to a halt. There are tr... read moreaffic jams, and people trying to get somewhere. However, very few seem to know where. One man is scared of the insurance men, after causing a fire, another has trouble with his stomach after an accident at a magic show. It's a film that requires you to sit and study, much like a poem. A lot of it is funny, such as the attention to detail. Seeing a parade of men in the background whipping each other is both unsettling but comical. It may have struck 10 years old, but a lot of the film has to do with accounts, brokers and businessmen. A repeated theme is the cost of business. This is still true, even more so today. Bizarre and interesting, but certainly a challenge.
  • 366weirdmovies
    January 28, 2011
    366weirdmovies
    A series of carefully woven absurdist and magical realist sketches set in a nameless Scandinavian city at the dawn of the millennium where flagellants parade down the street, no one can explain why there's a traffic jam, and a desperate church endorses pagan sacrifices. Extremel... read morey slow paced but rewarding to the patient; the quietly apocalyptic final scene with Kalle standing by the huge mound of discarded crucifixes watching figures on the horizon sticks with you---the image could have come from Bunuel, if he'd conceived it while suffering suicidal depression. Andresson's follow up, YOU, THE LIVING, is basically the same concept, but a bit funnier and more approachable.
  • arashxak
    July 3, 2008
    arashxak
    Strangely cold & bitter & I mean it when I say strangely, Loneliness, vulnerability, social breakdown & ... Looks like a warning , Anyway has some great scenes
  • puffchunk
    October 25, 2007
    puffchunk
    Um...This movie is crazy. Not in a good way, either. Save yourself 2.50$ and organize your bookshelf or something.
  • fb1142797643
    March 29, 2011
    fb1142797643
    Like it or not, "Songs from the Second Floor" sustains a unique, precarious tone. I suppose it must be labeled a comedy, but it's the bleakest comedy imaginable. Perhaps it's a case of characters being so devastated that the audience is left with no response beyond weary, nihilis... read moretic chuckles.

    Roy Andersson's detached portrait of a gray, joyless society introduces multiple characters, but this is a film about snapshots rather than stories. There's the incompetent magician, and the poor man he almost saws in half. There's the furniture salesman who burns down his store for the insurance money. There are his two sons: one ineffectual and lovelorn, the other institutionalized and mute. There's the other desperate salesman, who has decided representations of the crucified Jesus might be the one way to turn a profit. There's the adulterous doctor, and the senile real-estate mogul. There's the bedraggled executive planning to flee town. There are even a few ghosts walking around (naturally, their deaths were violent and unpleasant). Most haunting of all is the quiet little girl who is solemnly sacrificed, presumably as a last-resort ploy to generate prosperity. Meanwhile, traffic is at an apocalyptic standstill, and a pack of urban professionals trudges through town, miserably whipping each other. Are you laughing yet?

    The narrative doesn't really advance any of these situations. Everyone is stuck. Even the camera is stuck -- it only moves once, and just barely. Most characters are made up to look ghoulishly pale, and this severe, dehumanizing touch makes it hard to even relate to them as people. Nuggets of philosophical wisdom pop up here and there -- "beloved be the ones who sit down," "it's not easy being human," "life is time, and time is a stretch of road," "it's all about buying something you can sell with an extra zero" -- but the script offers no solutions to the desolation it portrays.

    Clearly, Andersson is an intriguing director. His carefully composed, geometric scenes make extravagant use of deep focus, sometimes to startling effect. A long conference table of withered department heads, a distant field suddenly filling with black-clad people, a procession of travelers pushing overloaded luggage carts...such images are not easily forgotten. But this is such a deadening film to watch. By the time you see an old man vomiting on a bar counter, dripping his yellow spew onto a floundering drunk girl below, you may be wondering if it's time to check out and pop in a Disney DVD instead.
  • lesleyanorton
    May 17, 2010
    lesleyanorton
    I got a little bored in this, so much so that five days on I can hardly remember what happened. People basically being a little selfish and a little depressing. Maybe I'll watch it in twenty years time and hail it as a masterpiece..
    Maybe not.
  • mrhaljam
    November 14, 2008
    mrhaljam
    One 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.
  • jes25924
    June 27, 2008
    jes25924
    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 a... read moredvertisers 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

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Critic Reviews

Michael Booth
April 23, 2004
Michael Booth, Denver Post

Let your literal, linear self take a chance on Songs From the Second Floor. Andersson is a philosopher with a brilliant eye for composing his ideas on the big screen. Full Review

Liam Lacey
April 25, 2003
Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

Like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python: It's seriously gloomy about the loss of spirituality in the world, but at the same time rudely, sometimes hilariously, absurd. Full Review

Roger Ebert
November 1, 2002
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

You may not enjoy it but you will not forget it. Full Review

Mark Caro
October 31, 2002
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune

A brilliant, absurd collection of vignettes that, in their own idiosyncratic way, sum up the strange horror of life in the new millennium. Full Review

Ty Burr
October 4, 2002
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. Full Review

Desson Thomson
August 30, 2002
Desson Thomson, Washington Post

Strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre.

Richard Roeper
July 10, 2002
Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper

This is wild surreal stuff, but brilliant and the camera just kind of sits there and lets you look at this and its like you're going from one room to the next and none of them have any relation to the... Full Review

V.A. Musetto
July 3, 2002
V.A. Musetto, New York Post

A devastating indictment of unbridled greed and materalism.

Elvis Mitchell
July 2, 2002
Elvis Mitchell, New York Times

A heartbreakingly thoughtful minor classic, the work of a genuine and singular artist. Full Review

J. Hoberman
July 2, 2002
J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Easier to respect than enthuse over, Andersson's rigorous personal vision is not only distanced but distancing. Full Review

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