Songs from the Second Floor

Songs from the Second Floor Swedish Snger frn andra vningen is a 2000 surrealistic Swedish film written and directed by Roy Andersson. It presents a series of disconnected vignettes that together interrogate aspects of modern life. The film uses many quotations from the work of the Peruvian poet Csar Vallejo as a recurring motif.

A man is standing in a subway car, his face dirty with soot. In his right hand he carries a plastic bag with documents, or rather, the charred leftovers of them. In a corridor a man is clinging desperately to the legs of the boss who just fired him. He is screaming Ive been here for thirty years In a coffee shop someone is waiting for his father, who just burned his furniture company for insurance money. Traffic jams and selfflagellating stock brokers are filling up the streets while an economist, desperate for a solution to the problem of work becoming too expensive, gazes into the crystal ball of a scryer. Everything and everyone is going somewhere but their goal and its meaning have disappeared along the way.Film critic J. Hoberman from The Village Voice concluded about the film Easier to respect than enthuse over, Anderssons rigorous personal vision is not only distanced but distancing.citation needed Roger Ebert of Chicago SunTimes gave the film four stars out of four and wrote, You may not enjoy it but you will not forget it. Anton Bitel, writing for Eye for Film, felt that the heavy symbolism overwhelms the storytelling. ........

Source: Wikipedia