Two doleful salesmen peddling joke items, like a terrifying mask called “Uncle One-Tooth,” are what connects this series of droll, nearly impossible-to-summarize vignettes.

Swedish director Roy Andersson has a distinctive style; his film is lit like a waiting room at Rikers Island and the actors look like victims of advanced cirrhosis. Whatever works. “Pigeon,” in its deadpan, hyper-composed way, is often paralyzingly funny, and there is compassion for the gray-faced souls wandering through it.

That’s why a late turn into animal torture and genocide has more weight than the material and mood can sustain. The film hits its absurd height earlier. As the salesmen stop in a modern bar, the army of 18th-century Swedish monarch Charles XII comes marching by. The boy king enters — on his horse — and flirts with a cute bartender, and the antique army leaves, on its way to near-annihilation by the Russians at Poltava.