Review of You, the Living

It takes the long, dark, teatime of the Swedish soul to make films like this, consisting of fifty short vignettes, each filmed in a single take, and not all relevant to each other. I have no idea what it was about, though some of the vignettes had a memorable quality. The IMDb suggests it is a "film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self-confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved." I didn't quite see it that way. A man alone in a room practising on a base drum (to the annoyance of a neighbour below), another man practising a Sousaphone, a crowd of people huddling in a bus shelter in the rain, a bar tender always calling time, a fat and middle-aged couple of Hell's Angels squabbling, a man in a traffic jam relating a dream. Actually, this one had its moments. He dreams he is at a dinner party and the table is loaded with crockery. He tries the old trick of pulling out the tablecloth without success, but revealing the tabletops with embossed swastikas, a reminder of Sweden's ambivalent attitude top Fascism. Accused of damaging property, by a show of hands he is sentenced to the electric chair (a nod I gather to Andy Warhol). Though a dream and nothing happened, it was quite chilling. In another scene a lot of people are sitting down to a formal dinner. They start singing and groups of them stand on their chairs until all are standing. Meanwhile the main speaker is called away to the telephone to deal with an annoying son.

The IMDb explained that the song is called "Oh, Alte Burschenherrlichkeit" in German, and is still sung by German fraternities, being a reflection on the old times. YouTube has several examples of the song. The version used in the film refers to the professions people have followed, and it is as these are mentioned that each group stands up.

The film ends with a fleet of B-52s flying over (presumably) Stockholm. Very Nordic.