Songs from the Second Floor

Rigorously staged vignettes in such striking settings as a furniture store, an airport, and a seemingly endless traffic jam build off of one another in Roy Andersson’s singular feature from 2000, which reckons with the melancholic norms and anomalies of the modern world. Through a diverse cross-section of Swedish life—including an office worker, an immigrant, an arsonist, and a magician—Andersson finds humanistic pathos through what he has referred to as “the complex image,” a tableau aesthetic designed to instigate social criticism via static long shots and layered compositions. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.