You've never seen a movie like this, and good for you!: Songs from the Second Floor

This movie's going to sound better than it actually is as I describe it, which in a sense is typical of many works made for the intellectual/academic marketplace: they're full of ideas that we can enjoy talking about, but did we really enjoy watching the film/reading the book? Anderson's Swedish film ca. 2000, "Songs from the Second Floor" (I think a more accurate translation would be ...from Another Floor) is full of haunting scenes and images, and you can trace the lineage of Fellini and of course the compatriot Bergman: the oddity of a traffic jam filling a city and freezing everyone in place, crowds of self-flagellants marching slowly along the streets, vast empty corridors of hospitals and factories, a huge empty plain that suddenly bursts into population, a haunting scene of a man injured on a railroad platform and nobody is able to help him, a weird scene in which a young girl (bloom of youth) is sacrificed, a poet stunned into silence, a magician whose saw trick goes horribly awry, a man fired from a factory after 30 years bursting into insane sobbing and wailing, ashen people frozen in despair - so much, so beautifully crafted, often like a DeChirico painting come to life, filled with allusions that are strange and ambiguous and just beyond our comprehension to fascism, Nazism, corporate greed - and yet, and yet - by the end I found myself yearning for intelligibility and tired of the sameness of tone. It's a movie about several indirectly related characters and I hoped for a glance toward convention, some way to bring these lives together and to drive the movie toward a conclusion or at least a climax, but that never happened. It's a film like none other, and maybe it requires more than one viewing to truly get it, but I'm afraid few viewers will give it even that much.