By 
A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE*****
Are we fully living the life-at-large experience or are we just satisfied with our daily tasks? Are we alive in this place we call home, or is it a walking-dead experiment? Are we confidant on the hope of a brighter future where the eternal reigns or are we just waiting the hours to pass through, living a day at a time while death approaches? What’s our main priority and what moves us towards accomplishment? With this philosophical context as a premise, Swedish director Roy Andersson wraps up his trilogy about being human, involving the audience into an exhilarating analyses about the pleasures and virtues of existence. Andersson grabs the audience right on the first instance as the film opens and never let go our attention: he examines three separate meetings with “death” just to change the focus of his lens into a different perspective: the joy and hope of living, and living abundantly. Through a series of interconnected stories, where past and present collides in a mysteriously morbid dreamlike atmosphere, the film uses the metaphor of a bird-watching to represent two important elements in its purpose: first, we are the ones reconsidering ourselves and analyzing the meaning of being here; in the other hand, it’s the Creator who’s observing our behavior, the divergence of our reactions and how we make use of His highest gift.
A pair of salesmen are willing to ‘help people have more fun’ wandering around trying to sell their ‘funny’ items; they are the moderators of the narrative, as they meet with the strangely complex bunch of characters who each represent the director’s vision for joy, life, death, desire, love, passion, ambition, aging, youth, marriage, family and compassion. His camera flies through the beige-like colored scenarios, capturing the pale faces and their saddened expressions, resembling pain, confusion and exhaustion, but they all remain optimistic and truthful to the need of understanding, protecting and caring one other, as well as they all preserve the hopes to enter Heaven when time is due; a proof of that is the extension of the line “I am so glad to hear you’re doing fine”, declared by everyone while on a phone call, which is like a metaphor for our response to the others’ happiness; they all look under the weather, living with the anxiety of modernity, but they remain attached to the compassionate essence of humanity, expressed in their attempts to make the best of living. Infused with a satirical criticism and a provoking sarcasm, this remarkable dark comedy invites to a meditation on life as a whole, and our responsibility as the leading specie. Winner of the Golden Lion in Venice, Andersson achieved an art film as never seen before, with unforgettable characters, a unique blend of magic, absurdism and contemplation for the human condition. And most importantly he encourages us to take the pigeon’s place in order to adjust.
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