You, the Living

Original title: Du levande

20072007
Not RatedNot Rated
1h 35m

IMDb RATING

7.4/10

16K

YOUR RATING

Comedy Drama Music

You, the Living 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.You, the Living 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.You, the Living 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.

IMDb RATING

7.4/10

16K

YOUR RATING

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Awards
- 10 wins & 7 nominations

Photos31

Storyline

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Did you know

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Trivia
As a child, Roy Andersson witnessed the moving of about 100 houses from the bay of Skarvik to Gothenberg to facilitate the building of a new harbor. This involved putting the houses on logs and then rolling them to their new location. This is the inspiration behind the vignette of the rock star and his new bride whose cosy domestic scene appears to be on train tracks.

Quotes
The psychiatrist: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
[examines the large stack of patient's files]
The psychiatrist: I am a psychiatrist. I have been for 27 years. I'm completely worn out. Year after year, listening to patients who aren't satisfied with their lives, who want to have fun, who want me to help them with that - it wears you out, I can tell you. My life isn't exactly a lot of fun either. People demand so much. That's the conclusion I've drawn after all these years. They demand to be happy, at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish, and ungenerous. Well, I would like to be honest. I would like to say that they are quite simply mean, most of them. Spending hour after hour in therapy, trying to make a mean person happy... There's no point. You can't do it. I've stopped doing it. These days, I just prescribe pills. The stronger, the better.

Connections
Followed by A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)

Soundtracks
Pulsation
Written by Benny Andersson

User reviews65

Review

Featured review

10/10

An intimate insight into what makes us all human

There is no plot. There are no central characters. There are no moving cameras or close-ups. In fact, this film does not follow any of the conventional storytelling techniques used by mainstream film. However, Roy Andersson's Du Levande is a remarkable piece of cinematic storytelling. It is a touching look at the human psyche.

Comprised of a series of vignettes, Roy Andersson gives us an intimate insight into what makes us all human. In perfectly framed static shots, added with the perfectly in tune, yet quirky, music, Roy introduces us to a host of characters as they undertake their daily existence. Some bordering on tragic, others hilarious, we are taken on a Nordic journey like no other.

It is a journey into the little things that make us human. Instead of over-the-top storytelling or visual techniques, everything is stripped down to the bare minimum so that our sole focus is on the characters themselves. It focuses on the insignificant points of our lives that make us who we are; our dreams, our desperation. It's through this simple observation of others that we can accept who we are as individuals.

The washed out colours and deathly-pale makeup of the characters only seems to emphasize their individual stories and remind us that unlike them, we are all alive. There is no happy ending or light at the end of the tunnel in this film, yet you walk out of the cinema with a sense of life. Much more accessible than his earlier film, Songs from the Second Floor, Du Levande, is a truly inspiring piece of cinema.

helpful•56

carinaroo
Oct 6, 2007

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