Something Happened

Andersson's mature style in its early embryonic form, developed over a series of shorts, TV commercials and then later in features, peaking with Songs in 2000 and in various moments scattered across 3 other similarly distinctive but less definitive iterations. Could have been longer.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that a documentary about AIDS coming from Andersson would be completely bizarre, depressing and hilarious all at the same time, but, I was.

Funded by the Swedish Board of Health to use in schools for AIDS education, this is one of the darkest, most bizarre things I've ever seen. The juxtaposition between narrative and image is hauntingly bleak and disturbing, and the use of black comedy (an elderly woman demonstrating how to put on a condom to a class of young girls, a man trying to get intimate with a disinterested woman on a ping-pong table) is downright unsettling. There are too many fucked-up moments in this short film to list.

Profoundly depressing.