"Man, Why Are You": Grey Humor

Marcelina 2022-03-22 08:01:03

There is such a French sentence: C'est la Vie, "this is life".

It's overused, and it can be used in almost every movie that writes about people. That's right, life is all-encompassing, positive, negative, hopeless, absurd, utilitarian, cruel, gentle, crazy, depressing. . . It's all part of life. In the end, it is inseparable from emotions and desires. For thousands of years, what the movie (story) is doing here is the same thing. To sum it up in one sentence, "This is life" has become the answer to everything.

This film is even more obvious. Fifty characters are sketched, and they are all ordinary people; they are concerned about their daily life, and they do not need to be grandstanding with too many eccentricities. They maintain a calm distance and bring the audience to the scene of life.


But so what? Looking back on the people and things that have appeared in it, which one is beyond our imagination? The man still "remembers" the bank's investment during sex, the hairdresser vents on the client's hair when he is in a bad mood, the homeless drags the dead dog, and even the woman tells her boyfriend to leave her and turns around but says she will go back to the other party soon. . . It can be regarded as a paradox of neuroticism, but can it be said to be provocative?

No. We are used to hearing these jokes, and any one of them alone will only be criticized as a cliché. However, is it effective to broadcast them together?

Not quite. Roy Andersson's sensitivity (or even fascination) for the details of life is unquestionable, but the key is how it "expresses", not the "content" of his obsession.

The pink-grey tone of the film, the melancholy wind music and the stalemate distance combine into a unified tone, which is full of vicissitudes and helplessness, depression and even more indifference. It can be seen that the concentration of emotions has been carefully controlled, and the more intense adjectives are useless, they are all profound, ambiguous and abstract. The audience is not involved from beginning to end, maintaining a very personal observation distance, which is a kind of contemplative withdrawal.

Beyond that, there are other hints to this brooding withdrawal from the film. The director placed various "bystanders" in each short story, and most of them were the protagonists in another short story. On the scene of being "bystanders", their wait-and-see behavior was emphasized, and many scenes were switched by one after another, either near or far, and the director was establishing a line of "extraction-observation- The hotline of "Contemplation" not only allows the audience to immerse themselves in this habit when watching the show, and naturally meditate, but also expresses the interchange of the roles of "seeing and being watched" in life at any time.

It is this kind of contemplative tone, which was not originally a gimmick, and became the right place to laugh. It was a kind of self-soothing after a loss, a wry smile, a gray humor.

View more about You, the Living reviews

Extended Reading
  • Katheryn 2022-03-22 09:03:03

    There is a fixed amount of tears in the world. If someone starts crying somewhere, someone in another must stop crying, laughing the same way. So let's not speak ill of our time, which is no worse than previous times. Let's not say good things about our times. Let's stop talking. Indeed, the population has increased.

  • Monserrate 2022-03-24 09:03:52

    When the B52 swarm appeared over the city, Goethe's verse was easily transferred from a sigh to a pair of wide-eyed eyes. Roy Anderson didn't try to show the new dimension of life, he just fiddled with everyone's scene scheduling, painted them pale face makeup, and strung the jokes that made fun of the world into a picture of God. grimaces.

You, the Living quotes

  • Mia: Serving non-alcoholic beer with food that smells so good. It's torture!

    Uffe's mother.: I only want what's best for you.

    Mia: Best! Is this what's best for me? Enduring this damned existance... with all the shit and deceit and wickedness and staying sober? How can you expect or even want a single poor bugger to put up with it without being drunk? It's inhuman. Only a sadist would demand that.

  • The psychiatrist: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

    [examines the large stack of patient's files]

    The psychiatrist: I am a psychiatrist. I have been for 27 years. I'm completely worn out. Year after year, listening to patients who aren't satisfied with their lives, who want to have fun, who want me to help them with that - it wears you out, I can tell you. My life isn't exactly a lot of fun either. People demand so much. That's the conclusion I've drawn after all these years. They demand to be happy, at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish, and ungenerous. Well, I would like to be honest. I would like to say that they are quite simply mean, most of them. Spending hour after hour in therapy, trying to make a mean person happy... There's no point. You can't do it. I've stopped doing it. These days, I just prescribe pills. The stronger, the better.