Eine Taube sitzt auf einem Zweig und denkt über das Leben nach

well, you see this is a conflict, conflict about being an ordinary man. and after all being an ordinary man takes you there in which all other people are dealing with just "being". Roy Andersson took care of that approach and made a pretty remarkable movie about "being". Ordinary men try to figure things out, ordinary men try to make friends, earn money, make some jokes, and live on. Joyful moments, sad moments, some bad news and some good news, some misunderstandings and so forth. Actually, the characters show the great determination to continue, a-must-see movie when you are having some existential trouble and something to hold on. Ordinary men have a great solution. Because they don't need to be happy all the time, they don't need to be sad all the time. A smooth way to mix the emotions and keep the balance.

This, a film about death; its stalking the unready, catching its survivors off guard, delivering problems of succession, needs to be viewed metaphorically. It plays out at a snail's pace and snares you just as death snares its victims. At first, we see the peaceful dove, AKA pigeon, protected by a glass bubble from the attacking eagle (örn) and get a sense of the portents to come. This comes to pass in a most inventive yet phlegmatic study of collective sorrow and fear of loss. Even if you know very little Swedish history, you cannot fail to recognise that the seemingly modern tale of two unsuccessful and troubled travelling salesmen is a metaphor for something else. Poor Jonathan wants never to meet his parents in heaven and is traumatised by visions of unspeakable horror. It is not just lost innocence. We get to see the dreams, the re-enactments of the glory days and the devastating defeat that lives on in the collective memory. Maybe he is a cry-baby. Maybe he has a true 'memory' of the extent of his, and his nation's loss. Quite magical but not your average cinema goer's fare.

This Scandinavian movie which takes place in an unnamed Swedish town is about bringing joy and laughter to people when there isn't really anything to laugh about. Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom) are two joke article salesman, who have only three products: vampire teeth, a canned laughter sack and a frightening rubber mask which they try to sell to resellers. However, the duo is not successful in what they do and so are their – not so funny – products and their uncreative and repetitive sales talk. As they stumble into financial trouble their friendship and business project is about to collapse.

This loose and rather sad story is patched with more absurd incidences. A longer scene takes place in a bar when the young Swedish King Charles XII (1682 - 1718) rides in, as he guides the army to the battle against Russia. Charles asks the handsome barman to come with him to the war. Later, when the army comes home and the war is lost, Charles again visits the bar because he has to go to the toilet. These scenes are not meant to be taken literally but rather embraced as pure images decorated with strange and morbid humor. The world which director Roy Andersson paints for the viewer is drab. There are no colorful things: walls are ocher, bars are gray, the furniture is simple wooden dark brown, and even the faces of the protagonists are white. Nevertheless, the dry jokes, the black humor and the absurdity make the movie fascinating and funny, though a guilty pleasure. Is it really OK to have a laugh or – even worse! – to sell jokes in a world that is so odd, so gray, so dark and sad?

There are two scenes that may have caused uproar but I think not many people made it that far since these scene appear rather late in the film. I won't give it away; you have to find out for yourself. The things that drive common movie goers away are the incredible slow pace of the movie (think of REPULSION (1965)) and the lack of a cohesive storyline. Art seekers on the other side will find an interesting and subtle movie with strange humor that is rarely found.

A person dying while opening a bottle of wine. And now for something completely different.

But Roy Andersson's movies are like that. You better brace yourself for a sequence of images, scenes and characters that may or may not fit together but are guaranteed to surprise, amuse and sometimes shock you.

It's better not to get specific with the plot. Mostly because there hardly IS one. But also because it unfolds chaotically, surreally, and the pleasure lies in its unfolding before your eyes. Snippets, shots, vignettes, events - uncensored, unorganized, like life itself.

The themes are down-to-earth. The scenes are fantastical. What would you call this: realist surrealism? supernatural naturalism? We are led from Swedish housing complexes to depressing industrial areas, faced with the doom and misery of urban Scandinavia.

Humanity is explored through its senseless capacity for inflicting boredom and suffering on itself and on others. No one is spared. This is pure existentialism on cinema - but with the hope of transcendence.

The audience reactions vary from bemused silence to Benny Hill laughter. You take out of this film what you are ready to give in.

Some may find the plodding pace tiring, the characters soulless and the gray urban settings drab and lifeless. But that is sort of the point.

As a sort of midpoint between Buñuel and Loach, Andersson's style is not to everyone's taste, and not without its faults. Just be ready to embrace, and enjoy, the misery of existence. Perhaps you'll be delighted, like I was, to find humour and absurdity in suffering.

Please, listen: if you are looking for a "classic" story you should choose something else. A story is here, indeed, but it's buried under a series of episodes and different POVs – it feels like we are having the chance to observe the behavior of the inhabitants of a parallel dimension from the fixed cameras of an internal surveillance video system (a very special one, equally able to look in the present, in the past and in the dreams of the strange characters displayed).

What we get, in the movie, it's a composite drawing of the social, private, and inner lives of those characters. And it's strange, of course: sometimes you can hardly tell the difference between the dream and the reality and the reverie – as those surveillance cameras never flinch and inch, even in front of the most strange happenings. But, even if the cameras never moves, the images we are shown constantly jump the tone of the story from drama, to comedy, to horror, to nonsense, with a quickness that is uncommon for the genre-related, petrified narrative codes we are used to.

The main thing I could understand, in the end, is that the problem of the people living in this world is their inability to care about each other's feelings. Some of them eventually even understand this, and with regret, because they realize that if you are not able to love your close ones then you will hardly be able to love yourself. Still, all of them look completely unable to go over this self-imposed limit: so it happens that the stuffed pigeon at the begin of the movie seems by far to be the most alive of the characters featured – not to mention the happiest one.