Directed by Ruben Östlund. Starring Villmar Bjorkman, Lola Ewerlund, Maria Lundqvist Club, IFI, Dublin, 98 min
ENCOUNTERING something as odd as Ruben Östlund’s comic Swedish mosaic, the viewer, eager for a road map, is bound to consider influences and comparisons.
There is certainly something of Roy Andersson in the film. As with that director's You, the Living,a detached, largely static camera records a dizzying sequence of often unconnected stories. We encounter a teacher who objects to rudeness in the staffroom and brutality in the corridors. Elsewhere, two teenage girls pose provocatively for their webcam and annoy innocent commuters on the bus.
In the film’s most pointedly absurd episode, a coach driver refuses to restart his journey until somebody owns up to breaking a shower rail in the vehicle’s loo. Bearings are hard to maintain.
That noted, for all the weirdness on display, the film, unlike You, the Living, never fully embraces the surreal.
Featuring reasonably naturalistic performances, Involuntary often skirts tragedy as it pokes around the characters’ quietly pathetic lives. The near subsonic Swedish murmuring is frequently interrupted by jarring, head-shaking confrontations. Squirm as an angry motorist bellows at the kids who throw a beer can at his blameless automobile. Shuffle as the two girls receive a sharp telling off from a forgivably unforgiving parent.
At such times, the picture calls up episodes from the films of Michael Haneke. Indeed, the confrontation on the bus looks like a direct nod to a more terrifying moment in the Austrian director's Code Unknown(another film composed of disconnected single takes). On the other hand, the humour is of the same hue found in Bent Hamer's lovely Norwegian comedies.
In truth, Involuntary is not nearly as engaging as the work of any those illustrious forbears. The distancing techniques do their work a little too well and the tone is too unstable for its own good. But this remains a delightful puzzle piece whose mysteries are worth trying to unravel.
For starters, what’s with the title?
