The characters in About Endlessness tend to shuffle along, hobbled by age or ailment or a broken high heel. One student, sitting in a dorm room with a classmate, expounds upon the endlessness of energy-about how our deaths do not create a vacuum, but rather a transference, and then another, and another, into eternity. Andersson is coy about the film’s deeper meanings, until he isn’t. A woman waiting on a train platform for a late pickup is given as much consideration as a phalanx of Nazi POWs marching toward Siberia, or man tied to a post, about to be executed.
Or rather as it echoes the profound, becomes it, outlives it. Swedish avant garde filmmaker and commercial director Roy Andersson’s latest collection of melancholy, wearily comedic vignettes considers the mundanity of life as it bumps up against the profound.
