Actually, love means never having to say much of anything, at least according to Roy Andersson’s A Swedish Love Story (1970), whose dyad of dewy-souled spring chicks gets by on colloquies composed of hums, chuckles, coos, and other close-cuddle cluckings. As embedded in an all-show, no-tell tale of middle-class families pervaded by status anxiety and loneliness, it serves as a kind of salute to one of our most popular consolations. The MFA’s presentation of Andersson’s features traces the punctuated arc of his persistent humanism from its beginnings in granular melodrama to its more recent orientation in gently absurdist formal experimentation, culminating in 2014’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.

A SWEDISH LOVE STORY (1970)
6/10, 6/14

SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000)
6/11, 7/2

YOU, THE LIVING (2007)
6/11, 6/12

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (2014)
6/12, 6/13, 6/14, 6/17, 6/18, 6/19, 7/2

GILIAP (1975)
6/13, 7/1

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