You, the Living (2007)
Mordant. I've never written that word before but it comes to mind here. Let me look it up. Well, it's part of it--corrosive, but also funny as heck. So corrosively funny. This is a dour film, for sure, with so much dry dry dry wit and quirky humor it's impossible not to like it on some level. Filmed in a very spare style, often with a static camera and really balanced, stable compositions, like theater stages, we see a short enactment occur.
But that makes it seem ordinary--which it is not. Ordinary life is shown to be frumpy, ironic, delightful, coy, and depressing. And impossible. We, the living, must live, and since we're alive, we may as well take note. Something like that. I think it was Ebert who said you find yourself laughing and don't know why. Exactly. And the promo material somewhere said it was a cross between Bergman and Monty Python, and what they mean is it has the dry, silent, probing look of Ingmar Berman's famous Swedish films, but it has the zany, somehow touching elements of the British comedians.
I'd say, definitely, definitely watch at least half an hour of this. There is part of me that thought I was through by then--the rest continues in a similar assemblage of little skits and moments, and they do gradually evolve, but there is no great plot to follow or climax of the usual kind. There are some great moments later, even just the attention to the thunderstorm, which takes us out of the mundane human events nicely.
The filming is gorgeous in its classical control, almost like a series of Gregory Crewdson scenes (and outdoing the photographer, actually). And the acting, with all its very ordinary, non-glam folksiness, is right on. A startling, beautiful, odd experience.
