“Giliap”

I’ve seen all of Andersson’s movies over the past few years — but in approximately reverse order. So I’m now back to 1975!

He didn’t direct a movie after this for 25 years, so I’m guessing this is gonna be the best movie ever.

OK, I’m pretty proficient in Swedish, but some slang is beyond me. And I’m not sure whether some of the utterances are supposed to be absurd, or whether they make sense. Like, these guys just mest and that guy sitting there said “jämna plågor” which (non-idiomatically means) “even pains”, which… er… doesn’t mean much…

And unfortunately there’s not Swedish 1975 Slang Search Engine!!! Who knew!

This is a fascinating film. I would never have guessed that it’s from the 70s — it has a sort of eternal/modern quality thing going on. So perhaps it seemed very old-fashioned in 1975?

Oh wow:

The reviews were very negative with almost no exception, calling it pretentious, old fashioned and reactionary on the level of a high school student caught up in French films from the 30s.

So I guessed right about people at the time finding it old-fashioned. But I don’t get a 30s vibe, either.

This is a very strange film, and I have no idea where Andersson is going with this. I mean, much much weirder than his 2000s films — they’re more stylised and clearly arteesteeque. This is like a normal film, only that none of the scenes make any sense.

So I guess it’s not an idiomatic problem:

“These people are evasively walking around each other, saying curious things of the type ‘we are destruction people’ and ‘we live like migratory birds’ and in the end I get the impression that Roy Andersson has got his whole philosophy of life from some film club that has gone through the dark French pre-war cinema with him, you know the one in which Jean Gabin always got shot right on the final step towards liberation.”

Well… it’s a Swedish movie from the 70s… I think there was a law about boobs.

Yes, I feel like that guy.

“wat”

This movie is, like, about that guy there, who seemingly has no personality to speak of, who meets these other absurd people, and then nothing happens.

It’s the sort of thing where you’re (I mean I’m) thinking “perhaps this is brilliant and I just don’t get it?” But I suspect that this is just shite. But it’s shite in a way that’s really original.

Hm:

Andersson admitted that the film contains flaws, and he said that the main reason for them was that he was not completely in control of the production, and therefore he had to compromise in several scenes.