Songs from the Second Floor

Asked his opinion of the Catholic Church, Keith Richards famously replied: "Great logo!" Richards' flippant remark occurred to me during the Swedish art film Songs from the Second Floor when a salesman, unloading and discarding different-sized crucifixes from his van, complains, "How can you make money on a crucified loser? What a fucking idiotic product!" Director Roy Andersson's serious satire isn't irreligious, but it pretends flippancy about a godless age. For inhabitants of the film's cold Scandinavian town, life is only a marketplace. In a culture of selfish, purely economic values, idealism is lost, discarded like so much religious paraphernalia.

Andersson, who made his feature debut in the 70s, then concentrated on a career in tv commercials before recently completing this feature, works in the idiom of logos and visual shorthand. Songs from the Second Floor plays like a series of live-action cartoon panels?a style of such audacious visual control and sly humor that Andersson would surely be acclaimed the new Kubrick (and the film become an object of pop fascination) if not for his religious focus. Songs from the Second Floor confirms this writer-director-editor's sincere belief in logos (what theologists call the creative word of God, identified with cosmic reason). Better than Kubrick's formal authority, Andersson's strangely estheticized humanism links to Spielberg's consummate ecumenical vision. There's something presiding over the quotidian adventures and miseries of Andersson's characters. When they break into song?ineffable chorales to express what they cannot otherwise articulate?the inspiration seems just outside Andersson's rigorous framing. (From above?)

Unlike Keith Richards' hipster cynicism, Andersson is genuinely, uniquely sincere. Yet his film's hit potential is limited because pop culture is fairly unaccustomed to religious wit. (Last instance was the late-80s Brit group the Housemartins, who proclaimed, "Take Jesus?Take Marx?Take Hope.") Andersson's one-take parables lampoon people aching for solace and faith. "It's not easy being human," moans Kalle (Lars Nordh), a businessman who has committed arson. Kalle's life is drab, his youngest son a cynic and the eldest son lingers in a sanitarium. ("He wrote poetry until he went nuts.") The family's dejection matches the town's spiritual condition?a crisis symbolized by an unceasing traffic jam slowing everything to a crawl.

Andersson portrays this void as a lack of warmth. He waggishly introduces characters in cold, queasy setpieces. A wife's failure to seduce her husband before going off to work looks like an old Alka-Seltzer commercial. A distraught woman using her cellphone in a bar to describe the surreal traffic recalls Edward Hopper. The eerie urban imagery leans toward visual deadpan. Andersson caricatures pale and emaciated or obese and bulbous figures, but you know he's serious when the laughs stick in your throat. His cast of nonprofessional actors is photographed to rid viewers of their usual, facetious movie-star identification. The movie commands pity, but also urges hard reflection on modern suffering; Andersson's simplified framing and stark compositions are meant to clarify human travails. The sight of a man dragging a huge crucifix toward a heap of others, saying, "I have my own cross to bear," suggests an absurdist Bruno Dumont, whose mix of religion and realism in Humanite confounded many.

Humor confounds the icy brilliance of Songs from the Second Floor. Andersson hails Chaplin as an influence, but the use of weirdly populated long shots?including a background parade of The Seventh Seal-style flagellants?also hails Jacques Tati. But humor isn't a distancing device; the one quality Ingmar Bergman (Sweden's great agnostic) rarely displayed, it's key to Andersson's emotional largesse. That Andersson's worldview proceeds from Bergman's is evident in the contemporary stress, the traffic jam of souls. Sterile public spaces (hospital, bus station, offices) match lifeless or cheerless private ones. One character laments the "chaos that just keeps up without anyone being able to explain." A wide, long-perspective airport scene of people racing to escape recalls the imperative of Bergman's 1968 Shame, which specifically followed citizens escaping from war. But Andersson, several decades on, sees that desperation as 21st-century slapstick. His airport shot is awesomely impressive; its urgent angle catches the migrating mob's straining toward relief.

If modern art-film culture has largely forgotten faith and religion, Andersson aims to evoke their essence. He begins with an epigraph from poet Cesar Vallejo: "Beloved be the one that sits down." Repeated with variation by different injured, suffering people in need of rest, the phrase seems ironic until the repetitions echo the Beatitudes?a plainspoken attempt to invoke kindness, grace, salvation. One tableau features a man wounded at a train depot mishap. "Clumsy all the same," a witness snaps; yet many others remember their own weakness. Kalle, in fact, is haunted by victims in his past?and history's. They march toward him at Andersson's ingeniously composed Crossroads. "Who can decide over fate?" Kalle asks. "All we can do is appeal to fate." He searches for virtue that has been rejected or twisted. "Jesus was crucified because he was a kind person. He wasn't the son of God, just a kind person." For Andersson, that's the voice of Doubt and it's felt in the powerful image of Kalle junking crosses. Throwing away religion and faith, no meaning can be made of suffering?or justice. Andersson's images (such as a gang attacking an unaided immigrant) are always bright, yet grim?suggesting it's not dark yet, but it's getting there. He reconsecrates the great logo.

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Andersson's view is not out-of-time, just out-of-fashion. That's the same problem facing Spielberg's reconsecrated genre movies. Reviewers who ranked Minority Report with Raiders of the Lost Ark reduce Spielberg to a mere entertainer because they are indifferent or blind or hostile to his ethical, pop-art-as-high-art pursuit. Andersson's film helps clarify this circumstance when he parodies the ironic regression of pop attitudes in one of his strongest segments: Tableau A features social elites lecturing a child in an indoctrination ritual. Tableau B shows the child blindfolded, led by false sophistication toward decline, the death of hope and generational genocide.

Last week's Village Voice demonstrated a version of that same tragedy when a cabal of writers debunked Minority Report simply to demonstrate their false sophistication. They denied that (until Songs from the Second Floor) Minority Report was the only movie in town worth seeing, worth talking about, thinking about, writing about. The only new movie you can really look at. With no insight, the hipster snipes ignored how Philip K. Dick's dystopian cynicism was overhauled to originate a different moral. Instead of a mystery-thriller, Spielberg created a thriller about the search for virtue. You could retitle it Visions from the Second Floor.

Substituting prejudices for what's actually on the screen is a folly?or calamity?worth correcting only to expose the cynical, atheistic indoctrination that hides behind kneejerk complaints that Spielberg is "manipulative," "sentimental," "unoriginal." Ed Park belittled MR's expressive imagery as "whistles and bells"?that's all the cgi generation has been trained to see. Paul LaFarge stabbed knitting needles in cinema as secondary to literature, rejecting Spielberg's notion of choice in favor of Dick's fatalism. Toni Schlesinger bought the p.r. hype about noir, unable to see for herself that MR is not noir. (Apparently she missed the NY1 interview where Spielberg said as much.) Greg Tate stopped selling black bohemianism long enough to accuse Spielberg and Tom Cruise of being "product managers." Guy Maddin chewed sour grapes over Cruise's star-empathy and Spielberg's visionary panache. Jane Dark jumbled Freud, Baudrillard, race politics and East Village chic into blindness. Guess that's what it means to be in the dark.

Andersson is clearly onto something when the godlessness he posits is apparent even among trendily negative film pundits who heartlessly ignore devotional content. Ironically, nothing's more holier-than-thou than the hipper-than-thou stance of bohos discrediting a filmmaker who speaks the popular idiom, thus privileging their own pessimism. Andersson might recognize this as a form of religious or moral intolerance and he wouldn't be off. The best recent writing on MR has been in Palm Springs' Desert Post Weekly where Gregory Solman, in fantastic detail, connected art-movie themes to Christian symbology and a transformed Hollywood tradition. He's open to Spielberg's originality. Chicago critic John Demetry read MR's moral issues through its artistic innovations?another example of estimable criticism occurring only outside the corrupted mainstream.

Further perverting liberal humanism, some critics refuse to see agape in anything. They don't know what to do with Spielberg's references to Tarkovsky and Dreyer, just as they miss the terror in Andersson's satire. This rejection of hope in film culture indoctrinates decline, death and intellectual genocide. Self-righteous hipsters would blindfold the audience to refute Spielberg and Andersson's professions of faith. Even Keith Richards has more grace.