Total Chaos: A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting on Existence
You know that feeling of ‘why am I me and not someone else? What is someone else?’ You might get it after reading Ulysses, or being in a contemporary art gallery too long; or simply staring at the shower wall. The same would probably happen if you were a Pigeon Sat on a Branch with nothing to do, right?
This is a film made of that feeling, and also of those other moments above, which may fly past you like a breeze or grow with you like a leaf as we bustle through life.
There are few films that perfect what I call ‘turning the world inside out’; in which a film is openly bizarre in its surreal visuals, odd characters or non-existent plots, but it constructs that oddness in order to externalize the insane-seeming thoughts we all have. It takes what is inside our heads and makes its world out of that. These films are strangely as realistic as any could be, because as the famous line says, we all go a little mad sometimes. It’s something we all share. So why not share a film that confronts us with it and then unite us through the experience of honestly seeing the beauty and humour of our everyday human insanity? Yes, it’s there, sorry to break it to you.
Writer-director Roy Andersson creates that world and its (few) words with a rare fusion of glee and subtlety. This is a film full of silence and stillness that somehow crackles with energy, like a sparkler not yet lit. Characters of non compos mentis navigate more subdued others with pitch black humour and brick jokes like “I’m doing well” in a way that leaves us completely lost as for to expect. A film that shocks with literally every scene change is another rare thing, though the disjointed and avant-garde is not for every audience, I admit.
Responsible for these unmoving yet ever-living tableaus that swing from macabre to boring to enchanting in seconds is a team alongside Andersson that deserves full credit; for the creation of a visual film language unlike any other I’ve ever seen. Cinematographers Istvan Borbas and Gergely Palos; artistic advisor Kalle Boman; set designers Julia Tegstrom (also costume designer) and company; trompe l’oeil artist Ulf Jonsson; and VFX artist Petter Cohen make the whole motley trick-spinning crew. They weave an olive, stone and sand palette into their mise-en-scene into the proverbial underland of our stretched thoughts. They show every sight, large and small, thus holding a mirror to every kind of us. There’s the staged elegance and effort of another Anderson influence, but less bright - James Joyce than children’s book, but charming in its postcards of distraction.
An ensemble cast navigates their pieces, large and small too; a world in which a kind can find you as easily as children blow bubbles out their window. Memory is a song, authority of gold and black can invade as you sell old jokes, and (in the film’s only misstep) even an instrument of slavery and suffering turns in our grasp, reaching for an examination of horror and beauty but coming out merely a shock of ugliness.
In his way of showing people themselves by turning us inside out, Andersson maps every idiosyncrasy and insanity if life really were to unfold as strangely as our branch-sitting thoughts did. For all this madness of depth, the film is complete artifice - framed, joked, linked - and yet somehow unselfconscious in rules, playfully aware. It somehow throws away the mirror it holds up to itself, while waving at its reflection.
How many times have you done that? I think a pigeon would too.
