You, the Living is a film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self-confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved.You, the Living is a film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self-confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved.You, the Living is a film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self-confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved.
- Awards
- 11 wins & 6 nominations
- Mia
- (as Elisabet Helander)
- Uffe
- (as Jugge Nohall)
- The fan
- (as Jan Wikblad)
- Professor
- (as Patrik Edgren)
- Consultant
- (as Ollie Olson)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaAs a child, Roy Andersson witnessed the moving of about 100 houses from the bay of Skarvik to Gothenberg to facilitate the building of a new harbor. This involved putting the houses on logs and then rolling them to their new location. This is the inspiration behind the vignette of the rock star and his new bride whose cosy domestic scene appears to be on train tracks.
- Quotes
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.
- ConnectionsFollowed by A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)
- SoundtracksPulsation
Written by Benny Andersson
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.
- secondtake
- Jan 15, 2010
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Details
- Release date
- Countries of origin
- Official site
- Language
- Also known as
- 啊!人生
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $21,438
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $6,924
- Aug 2, 2009
- Gross worldwide
- $1,843,810
- Runtime1 hour 35 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.66 : 1