You, the living - 32nd HKIFF

Roy Andresson's last film, "Song from the second floor", has been so stylish made for a film which concerns the state of the contemporary society that, You, the living was an highly anticipated follow up to such success. Whether it has lived up such expectation, it would be up to each of us to decide. Yet, there is no secret that the fact You, the living tries to tackle a more ambitious topic, the meaning of being alive in this world, the important/trivial we come across in life. Our dreams, desires, happiness, loneliness, selfishness, mundane style of living, endless repetitive problems we face over and over again (highlighted by a scene in which a man try to pick up the shortest queue to queue up but ended up stuck in the various queues for the longest). The cinematography was as stylish and as static. Deep-focused, wide angle shot was always used and only cut when one scene finishes. It almost like watching a stage play. Yet, structure wise, the film is probably not cohesive as "song from the second floor" as we were introduced to quite a few characters which only loosely related to each others. There are some breath-taking surreal scenes, such as the train-house scene at the end.
Despite all the "dark" humor used in the film, one can't hide the fact that it is a rather grim look of life as what it is. The sky is always in grey colour, if not heavy rain focused the characters into indoor. And at the end, the increasing no. of bombers appear on the sky seems to suggest all the people down below are all but doomed.