About Endlessness begins with the floating couple from the movie poster. They return only once, during a wordless vignette, flying over the bombed-out shell of a city. In total, there are 31 vignettes totaling the entirety of its economical 78-minute run-time. The visual style of this is very unsettling. Everything is gray and the actors look like they were done up at the morgue. God, what world is this? So boring and cold yet still, somehow, hyperreal. It's our world.
"Everything is energy and it cannot be destroyed," one character says. The 'point' of this is almost too obvious but I think that's also the point. Sometimes there's a narrator and sometimes there's not, just like life. Sometimes you're the main character (like Hitler), sometimes your'e simply a passing observation, and sometimes you're not even the main character in your own life. But all the while, you literally have no idea what's gonna happen next. More than anything, the format of this brings that concept home.
This is only writer-director Roy Andersson's sixth feature in over 50 years, but it's my entry point and I thought it was fantastic. He has directed over 400 commercials and the insular, short worlds he's exploring in this are clearly a byproduct of that. But life is fragmented and ever-changing, too. It's not just an artistic mutation of his ad work; it's bigger than that. I found parallels and humanity in nearly every scene. When one character cries out on a bus, in pain, that he doesn't "know what he wants" I thought of the words of the late David Berman...
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