It won for best actor, and for its editing and cinematography. The Swedish film is audacious, offensive, original, surrealistic. It is a series of vignettes in a lonely city gripped by psychic meltdown. A man collapses in a corridor and clings to his boss's leg when he is fired. A magician makes a horrible mistake while sawing a man in half.
Gridlock stops all of the city's traffic.
In a strange ceremony witnesses by clerics and dignitaries, a blindfolded little girl is made to walk the plank and fall into a deep pit full of broken stones. A bankrupt businessman empties a truck full of crucifixes at the town dump and moans that he invested in a loser. Some of the scenes are sacrilegious. Some are pathetic, as when a drunken woman tries to pull herself back up onto a bar stool while a man in a tuxedo vomits. Some are just plain funny, as when a businessman tries to explain a suspicious fire to insurance investigators, while through the window a parade of flagellants goes past.