Songs from the Second Floor

"If Bunuel and Tati and Beckett and Buster Keaton and Werner Herzog had collaborated on a film, it would not look like this, but it would want to."--Roger Ebert

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Songs from the Second Floor consists of 45 precisely staged vignettes in which a series of catastrophes suggest a bleak but outrageous sense of global doom. A traffic jam brings a city to paralysis, a nightclub magician's trick of sawing a man in half goes really wrong, and an immigrant is assaulted in full view of a crowd waiting for a bus.

Director Roy Andersson, once dubbed "the unknown genius of contemporary cinema," shot the film piecemeal over four years in his native Sweden. Set in a no manÌs land of a perpetually overcast, postindustrialized Europe, it also delivers the last word on the horrors of middle-management style, seeing it as yet another manifestation of millennial decadence. (98 mins.)