Songs from the Second Floor

Roger Ebert said it best: “You may not enjoy it, but you will not forget it.”

I enjoyed Songs from the Second Floor. The film takes shape through a series of disconnected vignettes. Roy Andersson eschews narrative in favour of weirdness. It feels like a very loose Wes Anderson film, underpinned by dark humour, muted colours and characters who all look half dead. There is a deep sadness running through it. Everyone seems resigned to their lives.

Quotations from the work of Peruvian poet César Vallejo recur throughout the film. I had never heard of him before. Apparently, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Lines from his poem Stumble Between Two Stars surface throughout. This is funny because one of the film’s main characters, if there really are main characters, has a son in a mental institution who supposedly “went nuts” writing poetry.

Other recurring motifs include traffic jams and self-flagellating stockbrokers. There are also two ghosts, one the victim of suicide, the other of murder.

Songs from the Second Floor looks unlike most other films, too. The framing is bizarre. Characters lurk at the edges of the image as though they do not have permission to step into the middle. When they finally do, they look lost.

Here’s the poem that Andersson quoted from in the film.

Stumble Between Two Stars

There are people so wretched, they don’t even
have a body, their hair quantitative,
their wise grief, low, in inches;
their manner, high;
don’t look for me, the oblivion molar,
they seem to come out of the air, to add up sighs mentally, to hear
bright smacks on their palates!

They leave their skin, scratching the sarcophagus in which they are born
and climb through their death hour after hour
and fall, the length of their frozen alphabet, to the ground.

Pity for so much! pity for so little! pity for them!
Pity in my room, hearing them with glasses on!
Pity in my thorax, when they are buying suits!
Pity for my white filth, in their combined scum!

Beloved be the sanchez ears,
beloved the people who sit down,
beloved the unknown man and his wife,
my fellow man, with sleeves, neck and eyes!

Beloved be the one with bedbugs,
the one who wears a torn shoe in the rain,
the one who wakes the corpse of a bread with two tapers,
the one who catches a finger in the door,
the one who has no birthdays,
the one who lost his shadow in a fire,
the animal, the one who looks like a parrot,
the one who looks like a man, the rich poor man,
the extremely miserable man, the poorest poor man!

Beloved be
the one who is hungry or thirsty, but has no
hunger with which to satiate all his hungers!

Beloved be the one who works by the day, by the month, by the hour,
the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame,
the person who goes, at the order of his hands, to the movies.
the one who pays with what he does not have,
the one who sleeps on his back,
the one who no longer remembers his childhood, beloved be
the bald man without hat,
the thief without roses,
the one who wears a watch and has seen God,
the one who has honour and does not die!

Beloved be the child who falls and still cries
and the man who has fallen and no longer cries!

Pity for so much! pity for so little! pity for them!