About Endlessness meaning: the title gets explained in one line halfway through
Roy Andersson's title is not decoration, and it is not left to interpretation. One character states the governing idea out loud, in plain physics, in a scene under a minute long, and the director has confirmed that's where the title comes from.
Roy Andersson's film runs 78 minutes, has no plot and no protagonist, and never explains itself. Except once, briefly, when a character does exactly that and then the film moves on.
Om det oändliga premiered at Venice on 3 September 2019 and won Andersson the Silver Lion for Best Direction. It is built from around 32 static shots, each a single unmoving camera set-up, most of them shot in his Stockholm studio on sets constructed in forced perspective. A woman's voice introduces many of them with the same construction: I saw a man who…, I saw a woman who… It was the first time in his career Andersson had used voiceover, and he took the device from Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour.
The scene that carries the title
A young man sits with a companion and explains the first law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted — which means the energy that constitutes a person is never going away, it just stops being that person. Andersson has confirmed in interviews that this is the film's title stated in dialogue.
"Everything is energy, energy cannot be destroyed. It can only be transformed into other forms," Andersson told Sight and Sound in 2020, adding that a person may end up as "a tomato or a potato. But you cannot destroy it."
That is the whole of the endlessness on offer. Not an afterlife, not a resolution, not a shape that the film is building toward. A conservation law, applied to human beings, delivered by a character who is not important and never returns.
What that does to the rest of the film
It reframes every other vignette as a fragment that neither begins nor concludes. Nothing in the film resolves because, under the thermodynamic reading, nothing can — it only gets converted into the next thing. The recurring figures are stuck mid-process:
- The priest — a clergyman who has lost his faith, dreams of dragging a cross through a jeering crowd, and can't get his doctor to take the problem seriously.
- The man cut dead in the street — he greets an old schoolmate, Sverker Olsson, who refuses to acknowledge him, and he keeps telling people about it.
- Hitler in the bunker — shown near the end, surrounded by a collapsing staff, as one item in a sequence rather than a climax.
- The father in the rain — kneeling to tie his daughter's shoelace on the way to a birthday party, in weather that makes it pointless.
- The floating couple — two lovers drifting above a bombed city, lifted directly from Marc Chagall's Over the Town.
The lighting is part of the argument
Andersson shoots without shadows, on purpose, which is why the images look like dioramas lit from every direction at once.
"In my pictures you can't hide. You are naked," Andersson told Sight and Sound in 2020.
Applied to a film about energy that can't be destroyed, that produces a very specific effect: nobody in the frame gets a dark corner to stand in, and nobody gets an ending either. Gergely Pálos shot it.
Where it landed
Critics took it well — 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, 87 on Metacritic — and audiences did not, with a worldwide gross of $403,455. Andersson announced afterwards that it would be his last feature. He was 76 at the time of the Venice premiere.
For the record: the man delivering the thermodynamics speech is trying to comfort someone. It does not work, which is roughly the film's position on comfort generally.