YOU, THE LIVING/DU LEVANDE

Directed by Roy Andersson. Starring Jessika Lundberg, Björn Englund, Fred Anderson, Leif Larsson, Jan Wikbladh, Håkan Angser Club, IFI, Dublin, 95 min
Photograph: The Irish Times

A KEY scene in this mordant, brilliant Swedish comedy focuses on a man who has been sentenced to death for damaging valuable crockery while attempting that old trick involving the rapidly tugged tablecloth.

Wailing uncontrollably as he is strapped into the electric chair, he eventually attracts the attention of an official who leans in to offer a comforting word: "Try to think about something else."

You, the Living begins with a warning of encroaching catastrophe and moves on to show various eccentric citizens - a crafty pickpocket, a gloomy psychiatrist, a tuba player - thinking about "something else" while they await their own personal doom. The resulting mosaic is hilarious, unsettling and quite unlike anything else we have seen in the cinema over the last seven years.

It was in 2000 that Roy Andersson, a man eccentric enough to remain an anti- capitalist while working in the advertising industry, produced a puzzlingly delightful oddity entitled Songs from the Second Floor . You, The Living is a tad less alienating, but somehow manages to be much funnier without compromising the director's pessimistic worldview.

Andersson's grounding in advertising shows through in his ability to make satisfying dramas of 50 individual - and only occasionally interconnected - comic vignettes. Each section features one take and demonstrates a stubborn reluctance to move the camera unnecessarily. In less skilful hands, such an enterprise could appear arch and disjointed, but Andersson allows certain common visual themes and stylistic ticks to bind the picture together into a profoundly satisfactory whole.

A grey-blue pall covers all the action. Supporting characters have a tendency to come together in huddles and cram themselves into lifts and bus shelters. Throughout the picture the line between the characters' dream world and their everyday existence is blurred to creative effect.

There are too many highlights to allow easy summary, but mention must be made of an astonishing sequence in which a house appears to move through the countryside like a train. As weird as anything in the films of Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze - surely disciples of the sexagenarian Swede - the scene proves that the laughter of darkness can be full and hearty.

© 2008 The Irish Times