SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR

Winner of last year's Special Jury Prize at Cannes, inspired by the obscure Peruvian surrealist poet Cesar Vallejo, soundtracked by Benny from ABBA (!) and directed by one-time enfant-terrible Andersson, Songs From The Second Floor is a real oddity.

You wouldn't instantly recommend it to all comers - the film eschews all conventional notions of drama in favour of forty-two associatively linked vignettes which attack conformity, capitalism and just about every other Western vice you could care to mention. In doing so, however, it powerfully conveys a humanity oppressed by every alleged convenience from cars to investments, and despite its faint whiff of pretension, Songs is shot through with such darksome, macabre humour that you wouldn't dare dismiss it outright.

Set in an anonymous, sunlight-starved Scandinavian town, greyer than a post-nuclear landscape and brought to a standstill by an inexplicable traffic gridlock, this bizarre and sprawling collection of cautionary tales opens with a devoted workaholic facing a humiliating redundancy after thirty years of service. Elsewhere, a conjurer's saw-a-man-in-half routine goes horrendously wrong, while a catatonic taxi-driver sits motionless in an asylum, having driven himself insane writing poetry. An immigrant asks a group of businessmen for directions and is violently kicked to pieces, while a senile Nazi war criminal celebrates his hundredth birthday and inquires after Goering's health… you get the general drift.

Amidst all this absurdity is Kalle (Nordh), a furniture salesman who torches down his business for the insurance money. He winds up at a crucifix convention seeking a more profitable line in retail, all the while being followed around by an erstwhile creditor and a Russian victim of Nazi war-crimes, both of whom are actually dead.

If this isn't a bewildering enough line-up, rest assured they are prey to a range of accidents so bizarre they appear to have been dreamed up by a paranoid schizophrenic with a sense of humour - and once you've keyed into its weird sensibility, Songs is highly enjoyable, endlessly unpredictable stuff. It bears more resemblance to installation art than cinema, with all the interlinking stories remarkably composed and coherent given that the film was made without a script or a shooting schedule, and every scene shot in one take by a virtually motionless camera.

It isn't suited to all tastes, and this is an arthouse affair if there ever was one: the average popcorn-munching punter will be left scratching his/her head in utter bewilderment while a large '?' hovers overhead. Nonetheless, we're inclined to warm to director Andersson, returning to action here after a break of twenty-five years: he was once widely regarded as the world's 'greatest unrecognized director', but seemed to disappear off the face of the earth after he snubbed the 1970 Berlin Film Festival, refusing his Golden Bear award as a bourgeois affectation at odds with his Marxist principles. Good man, Ron!

Depending on your disposition, this is either a ponderous slice of bullshit pretension or a genuine surrealist classic worthy of Bunuel. The truth is probably midway between, but we're willing to declare for the latter option.