About Endlessness

Director: Roy Andersson
Year Released: 2019
Rating: 1.0

An omniscient female narrator "sees" the following in modern day Sweden (and even into the past): a waiter overpouring a glass of wine, a man sleeping on a mattress filled with his life savings, a couple floating in the sky, two parents watering the grave of their dead son, a legless man playing a mandolin, Hitler in his bunker, a man hitting a woman in a market, etc.  The official "description" for this makes it sound like it's Andersson's "meditation on life and death" but that's just a cute catch-all: it's just a glib collection of random events he came up with, and there's some religious imagery (a man carrying a wooden cross, a priest having a crisis-of-faith) tucked in for good measure.  Past films from him have at least had funny moments and clever punchlines, but he doesn't even bother this time around; glibness-as-an-aesthetic doesn't work for me.