Simply A Masterpiece

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I have to admit, I really struggled with watching this movie. As a whole, it (kind of) make sense: the fate of humanity and how no one knows where we're going, how grey and flat things are etc. There are however so many scenes where I just kept on asking myself, what does this mean, but no answers were provided. Stylistically it feels as if you're watching Storm Thorgerson's moving pictures, so that part is quite nice, especially the final scene. But at the end, the movie left me feeling empty, but not because it is its intend to do so, but because I've no idea what was going through director's head when each shot was made. And internet, nor other reviews provided much explanation. I would love to watch this movie again with the director sitting by my side, explaining what he meant to say with each scene.

Songs from the second floor, meaning not the first, perhaps of childhood, that is close to the ground and just up the stairs, and not the penthouse with its airy , unobstructed view of horizons, but the second floor, the middle space of life, the cramped space. This is the life being sketched, a series of vignettes about quiet unfulfillment with various characters caught in dead ends of a flat life that goes neither up nor down. A recurring motif shows characters caught in traffic jams with cars just inching forward a few yards now and then, car horns can be constantly heard through the windows suggesting this stifled urge to move forward. It's all so effortless and graceful here, a few strokes of immovable camera abstracting the din of real life and bringing to the fore a crystallized view of that deeper reality that hides behind appearances and eludes us. At the same time if the whole commentary here was about a sterile modern life, if the only view that was crystallized was about how life sucks in the alienated West, "ennui" and all the other things, I'd leave it for others to enjoy, there's no value for me in calling wallowing reflection, but this is also about a response to it and an attempt to formulate a worldview; songs instead of Bergman's mute horror at the absence of god. So what kind of song? Not actual ones but a playfulness that sings about suffering. An early vignette marvelously shows this, a man climbs on a stage to be sawed in half as part of a magician's show but as the saw dips halfway through the box he starts gasping, actually being cut. Having been stitched, this hapless fellow is back home and as the wife changes sides on the same bed her movement makes him hurt and moan. There's actual pain in life, it's not illusory though we'd like to pretend it is in the spectacles of diversion we concoct. There's pain in being on the same bed with another. And yet the whole film is sketched from a distance of camera that shows this pain to be only part of the stageshow, only acted as part of it, it does not spill on this side of the viewing, it does not try to cause suffering, it does not "fix" the mind (Bergman does), it does not sweep us to believe in the illusion of a man having been cut. Having unlocked this, what? The entire film is about characters coming and going from that stage, some of them more obnoxious, but underneath the cynicism there's a gentle view that says these are the games we play, the roles we enact. My girlfriend still found it depressing so maybe this is me. And this ties into something else. Almost all the film talk I read revolves around what makers accomplish or not, never about how we ought to view, as if we had all that figured out and we had no business to grow ourselves. It's the same underlying tendency that makes so many people complain about how bad the world is, this or that, never about their response to it. Always about a lack of beauty and meaning, never about how they can cultivate it. So it is here. The filmmaker has covered a lot of ground that stretches from obvious critique to subtler evocation and maybe he would explain the point of the film as the former but it's his capacity to go from one to the other that elevates it. It falters back and forth a bit, unsure if to despair after all or not. But it's up to you how big your horizon. The first review here harps on about the evils of capitalism. How far will you see?

This is an on-the-mark masterpiece that keeps getting better every time I see it. It's about the very essence of being human, about guilt and betrayal, about invoking higher powers and making ends meet. How to get bread and butter for the dinner table. Some of the scenes are just madly humorous, others really heavily sad. There are some rather disgusting scenes as well, but together with Benny Andersson's sharply fine-tuned music, this film becomes a masterly experience. Purchase it, append a digit to the retail price, and resell it to your best friend! Songs is more coherent and less dreamlike than "You the Living". My grading: 9.67

Wonderful existential cynicism!!! This movie dissects human traits and human patterns of behavior with a lovely dispassionate humor. The filmmaker holds up his mirror and in it we see the business world as a serious and entropy-laden failure, organized religion as artifice--literally the manufacture and selling of different-sized and styled crucifixes --- a failing business of another color, the human collective as very much out of sync with itself and the organic realm--another form of failure, and through everything a touch of sadness.I loved the sanity of this. At least I thought the film sane. It reveals a flawed and inept society of men and women, most of whom have some, if little, insight to their predicament. That life is a series of miscues, that no one can lay claim to being error-free, and that those who are more skilled -"professional"- are merely making mistakes at a more involved level is the humbling message we see repeated in mostly every vignette.The film is shot, as others have remarked, with a still camera, and the actors constitute the movement, usually very constrained and staged. So the film is by no means verite, yet through its dark cynical humor, it reveals the chafed and tender areas that everyone knows yet few will admit and fewer will proffer for public discussion. His actors are caught in a world in which escape is desirable but no one knows how. Or where to begin. They are trapped and much like the characters in Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" the irony is in learning to accept the trapped state without questioning too deeply the nature of the trap. Rumination is destructive. Anderson's characters are unable to find peace or contentment in their lot.