"With all the misery in the world, how can we not get drunk?" – Mia

A lovely aerial view of a major city turns ominous with the approach of a fleet of airplane bombers; an irate hairdresser reacting to a perceived racial slur cuts a road through a businessman's bushy hair; a man dreams of being dragged to an electric chair after a failed magic trick and a teacher breaks down in front of her grade school class because her husband called her a hag. These and about fifty other vignettes that run the gamut from the outright depressing to the wildly humorous to the joyously uplifting populate Roy Andersson's You, the Living, his first feature since his critically acclaimed if commercially unsuccessful Songs From the Second Floor.

You, the Living is filled with the same kind of imaginative set-pieces as Songs, replete with black humor, surreal situations, and strange looking characters. Though a bit overlong and less focused than his earlier work, what remains constant is Andersson's unmistakable style with its stationary camera, sterile-looking backgrounds, and precise attention to detail. If there is a theme that ties the sketches together, it is that our time on Earth is limited and "tomorrow's another day', so let's treat each other with kindness. Along the way, we are entertained by tuba and drum music from the Louisiana Brass Band, dinner guests at a banquet hall standing on their chairs singing a rousing song, and a house that turns into a moving train.

The emotions range from the gloom of a daughter attempting to communicate with an Alzheimer's patient to a young woman's ecstatic dream about marrying a handsome guitar-player named Micke to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers. While there is no continuous narrative thread, the theme of greed and desperation appears in several sketches. The first of these threads features two corpulent individuals and their tiny dog sitting on a park bench, the woman bewailing the fact that no one understands or loves her, yet she blithely ignores the man's comforting and reassuring words.

There is also a hefty admixture of irony. During what seems to be an executive luncheon, one man tells another on the phone that workers don't appreciate quality and how nice it is to appreciate money and the things that it can buy such as fine wine. When he is not looking, however, a man at an adjacent table calmly lifts his wallet from his jacket on the back of his chair. Though Andersson's cynicism is at times not very well hidden, You the Living has an underlying humanism that shows compassion for the human condition. It is a cautionary tale that looks at the mess we humans have gotten ourselves into but suggests there is still time to turn it around, if we heed the warning of the poet Goethe that opens the film, "Be pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot."

You can't really call Roy Andersson prolific, (6 films in 37 years). Nor can you accuse him of being conventional; he doesn't do 'straight-forward', at least when it comes to narrative. "You, the Living", his first film in seven years, is like a surreal documentary in which a large number of characters are observed doing nothing very much and if that sounds off-putting, let me assure you it isn't. This is a funny, accessible and surprisingly warm-hearted movie, a slice-of-life far removed from that which we normally see on the screen.

Of course, 'slice-of-life' is hardly the proper moniker to apply to this movie since most people's lives are unlikely to be anything like this. The incidents on the screen run the gamut from the almost terrifyingly ordinary to the downright wacky and while characters may flit by, sometimes never to be seen again, others to reappear as if anxious for approval, Andersson bestows on them all a kind of benign affection. That, and some rollicking music, ensure the time we spend with them is time well-spent.

Swedish director Roy Andersson is 76 years old. He made his first feature film in 1969, and has since made six more films, most recently this year. Seven films in half a century. 'Du levande' ('You, the living') from 2007 was his fifth film, and the first one I saw, on the recommendation of a new Internet friend. If I am to judge after this film, however, Andersson is one of the most talented and original Scandinavian directors, a special personality even in the context of a film school that does not lack innovators and explorers of unique ways of cinematic expression.

'Du levande' is a film whose structure is quite different from everything I've seen so far. The scenario lacks a clear narrative line, if we were to compare this film with a book we could say that we are not dealing with a novel but with a collection of short stories, which all take place in a similar urban space, with some shared characters, but also with many others most of them, showing up in just one of the episodes. I don't think there is any happy character in the movie. Everybody seems to exist in a space suspended between semi-life and death, some long for something they can't reach, others are completely resigned. The most vivid and dynamic sequences of the film are actually two dreams, one of which is a nightmare, the other one mirrors an aspiration that cannot be fulfilled in real life. One of the characters is a psychoanalyst, but he also confesses in a monologue addressed to the viewers his routine, boredom and inability to help after 27 years of profession. In the film written and directed by Roy Andersson, dream and absurd meet. The flounder of his characters has no chance. The impossibility of communication and the futility of the hopes of his heroes reminded me of the plays of two of the important playwrights of the second half of the 20th century: Eugen Ionesco and Hanoch Levin.

Most of the actors are, as I read, amateurish, but the excellent guidance of the director makes them act and move coherently and consistently with the message and atmosphere of the film. Apart from the few characters that appear in more than one of the film's scenes, the other strong common thread is the cinematography. The sets seem to have been created especially for 'Du levande' and filming took place entirely in studios. This is a return to the classic shooting style of the 1930s, but also a subtle interpretation of the 'Dogma' rules. The color palette is constantly dimmed, we are in a perpetual and foggy twilight, at the hour when Scandinavian pubs are closing, with the notable exception of one great thunderstorm with torrential rain. Time seems suspended, perhaps this is the world without pain and without seasons of the song with a painfully beautiful melody performed on two occasions, of which once at a funeral service. Death is always present, but it is not frightening, perhaps because the heroes of the film have already crossed the bridge? I understand that in other of Roy Andersson's films, the social and political issues play an important role, here they pass on the second plane, appearing explicitly once, in a prayer of a character whose face we will never see. 'Du levande' is a beautiful and special film, to which the viewers continue to think long after the end of the screening. One last association that comes to my mind is that of Magritte's paintings.