A Jury Prize winner from Cannes 2000 and invitee to Roger Ebert's 2001 Overlooked Film Festival before going largely unnoticed during its extremely limited theatrical release last August, Songs From the Second Floor took Swedish writer/director Roy Andersson four years to complete (and you thought you waited a long time for Stanley Kubrick to finish Eyes Wide Shut). Dark, surreal, depressing, bleak and based on a poem by Peruvian Communist Caesar Vallejo, Floor is comprised of 46 vignettes, some steeped in Swedish folklore, others in religion, and most damning the current state of our modern capitalist society.

The stories are not all related to one another, though each is set in the same nameless Scandinavian city during what I can only imagine is supposed to be either the eve of the Apocalypse or the end of the Millennium (Remember Y2K?  It was still a real threat back when Andersson came up with the story).  The main character is Kalle (Lars Nordh), who, as the film opens, has just burned down his own furniture store and spends the following scenes repenting in dust and ashes like Job.  Some of Kalle's many, many problems include being haunted by the ghosts of two dead men, as well as his cab-driving poet son who is in a mental hospital.

There are other stories, and they're just as deliciously odd. One looks like it could have been an outtake from the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy, while another features a pile of crucifixes at the local dump.  There's even a spot in which a group of subway fares break out into a singalong opera, a la the "Wise Up" scene from Magnolia.  Toss in the child sacrifice and the parade of slow-moving marchers who flagellate themselves as they leave their way through the traffic jam that has lasted for several days, and you've got a pretty good idea of how unconventional Floor is.  It's Beckett meets Monty Python. Parts of it seem like they were lifted from Terry Gilliam's subconscious, pressed through Kafka's meat grinder and into Buñuel's casings.

And that's just the story.  Think the images in Road To Perdition were carefully constructed?  These will knock your socks off, while filling your heart with dread and despair. Floor is (mostly) populated by very unattractive non-actors who are either deathly thin or morbidly obese, but each is pasty enough to make 2002 Michael Jackson look like 1978 Michael Jackson.

Andersson, who also produces and edits, moves his camera exactly one time during the entire film (he might be camera-shy, as this is only his fourth film since A Swedish Love Story won four trophies at the 1970 Berlin Fest). You may be asking, "What about the music?"  It's composed by ABBA's Benny Andersson. 'Nuff said.

Floor is probably the kind of film most won't "get" (I know I didn't) but is so enjoyably unusual, following the plot seems unimportant (another recent example of this would be Mulholland Drive).  For me, any movie in which a character loudly wonders, "How can you make money with a crucified loser?," when prodded into a career of selling Jesus effigies, is one hell of a cinematic experience.

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