PRESENTING the funniest movie of 2009 (so far). It’s “You, the Living,” a collec tion of 50 absurdist sketches written and directed by Roy Andersson, a talented gentleman from Sweden.
Prolific, he’s not. This is just his fourth film in four decades. But that’s because he’s a perfectionist who sometimes does 50 takes of one scene. (He also makes TV commercials, some of which are on YouTube.)
His laugh-out-loud vignettes in “You, the Living” involve a cross-section of Stockholm. If the people have anything in common, it’s their rotund bodies and gloomy minds.
Andersson says his film “is about the human being, about her greatness and her miserableness, her joy and sorry, her self-confidence and anxiety.”
Indeed, the people on-screen are melancholy and downtrodden. The soundtrack of Dixieland jazz (Woody Allen would approve) adds to the film’s surreal charm.
The most outlandish episode involves a man in overalls who is sentenced to the electric chair for failing miserably at the old tablecloth trick.
As a result, a 200-year-old set of china was destroyed — and no punishment less than execution is to be tolerated.
Here’s more: A pudgy woman wearing an antique soldier’s helmet makes noisy love while her male partner drones on about finances. A barber gets revenge on an unpleasant customer. A heavyset couple argues on a park bench before the woman bursts into song. A teen girl discovers her rock-star idol in a bar and dreams of marrying him.
Andersson has a one-of-a-kind style that not all viewers will appreciate. His humor is not at all like Hollywood’s. His is leisurely and cerebral — two words never heard in La La Land.
vam@nypost.com
YOU, THE LIVING
How Swede it is!
In Swedish, with English subtitles. Running time: 95 minutes. Not rated (sex, nudity). At Film Forum, Houston Street west of Sixth Avenue.