Capitalism, consumerism, genocide and guilt; just some of the themes covered by filmmaker Roy Andersson in this 14-minute experimental piece. As with his most recent films, Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, The Living (2007), World of Glory (1991) sees Andersson create a series of interconnected visual tableaux about a seemingly everyday man and the crumbling world that he inhabits.
Andersson uses the same principal as in his TV commercials, keeping the scenes concise and to the point; presenting us with a world filled with fragile, sickly looking people - the stench antiseptic and detergent pungently conjured in our minds. This mere description hints at the film's bleakness, a bleakness that is too hard to describe. With Songs from the Second Floor, Andersson used his series of vignettes to present to us the theme of cultural alienation using surrealism and black comedy. With World of Glory however, almost all elements of comedy have been discarded, leaving us with images of cheerless, unwelcoming reality.
That isn't to say that the film doesn't reward. The final scene complements that shocking opening image, making Andersson's message of repressed guilt as obvious as a punch to the stomach. It is only natural for the central character's carefully constructed world to fall down around him with the secrets he has been hiding, or indeed, the secrets that any one of us may be hiding; finally spilling out, until we here screaming in our sleep. There is no single way of interpreting or understating this film. The images wash over us, sometimes infuriating us with that sense of bleak, unbroken silences.
World of Glory acts as an astonishing companion to Andersson's more accomplished Songs from the Second Floor, and acts as a wonderful antidote to all those mindless summer blockbusters that permeate the cinematic sphere. As the cliché goes, you may not enjoy it, but you'll most certainly be left thinking about it for many weeks to come.
