Comedy demands a fixed perspective. If you can’t figure out where a joke is coming from, you’re not going to get it, no matter how good a sense of humor you have. All the great pioneers of American movie comedy operated from deeply held personal beliefs: the humanism of Charlie Chaplin, the modernism of Buster Keaton, the anarchy of the Marx Brothers, and the misanthropy of W.C. Fields were like natural springs that never ran dry, creating a context that followed them from film to film. Perspective is what distinguishes real comic filmmakers like Woody Allen and Albert Brooks from the endless succession of sketch-comedy alumni who score a few times at the box office, then dry up and blow away.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Roy Andersson, who wrote and directed You, the Living, takes the idea of a fixed perspective to a literal extreme. Every scene in the movie transpires in an unbroken long shot, beautifully composed and rigidly controlled. Usually the setting is a room viewed in two-point perspective, the strong diagonal lines broken up by Andersson’s miserable, often rotund characters. Sometimes a door will be open, exposing in the next room another character who provides mute witness to the main character’s predicament. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Andersson cited George Grosz and Otto Dix as painters who influenced him, but his minutely detailed long shots, many of them created on studio soundstages, also recall comic-strip panels—not the clean, minimalist squares popularized by Charles Schulz but the busy tableaux inhabited by early comic-strip heroes like Popeye and the Yellow Kid.
Yet the real key to Andersson’s comedy is his stark view of humanity: most of his characters are cruel, selfish, or just oblivious. When the man from the family banquet is surreally sentenced to death for breaking all the dishes and strapped into the electric chair, an observation window reveals rows of spectators munching on popcorn. A man practices the tuba in his apartment, and when his downstairs neighbor pounds on the ceiling with a broom, he succeeds only in dislodging a hanging lamp; but the punch line doesn’t arrive until Andersson cuts to a man standing on his balcony across the street and watching this conflict play out in silence through lit windows. “Nobody understands me!” complains a woman brooding on a park bench near the beginning of the movie, and her sentiment is widely shared. Eventually she gets herself laid, going to bed with the tuba player, but as she straddles and humps him, concentrating on her own pleasure, he prattles on about his retirement portfolio.
But as with most car salesmen, you can never be certain he means what he’s saying. Since the seismic shock of Saturday Night Live in the 70s, a whole generation of comedians has grown up pandering to the current zeitgeist or just firing at anything that moves. From Chevy Chase to Conan O’Brien, they’ve taken great pains to hide their own beliefs—personal, political, religious, whatever—to maintain that hip aura of aloofness. When someone like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher or Dennis Miller actually says what he thinks, he’s immediately labeled as “controversial,” but that’s only because the majority of comedians are so afraid to let on where they’re coming from. As any marksman will tell you, you have a better chance of hitting your target if you’re standing still.
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard Directed by Neal Brennan Daily, multiple venues
