October 25, 2008
NOTE: This is a combined review of Ingmar Bergman's "Faith trilogy" (1961 - 1963).
Bergman's intense, claustrophobic triptych is a challenge even to hardened cinephiles. At times almost unbearably bleak, the three films exhibit an uncanny psychological realism, som...( read more)e of Bergman's most darkly beautiful dialogue and astonishing, ground-breaking performances (particularly from Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin). The director's skill in transmigrating heartbreak and internal suffering onto film has never been surpassed, and a viewer brave enough to watch these three devastating portraits of collapse will be rewarded with unforgettable insights into the fragility of happiness and the confusing, euphoric nightmare of the human condition.
In Through a Glass Darkly a schizophrenic young woman, Karin, is holidaying with her father, brother and lover at an idyllic lakeside farmhouse. Though she believes herself to be cured, her psychiatrist and lover (Max von Sydow) confides in her father that her condition is in fact incurable, and a relapse is certain. It happens almost immediately, when the two older men go fishing and leave Karin with her younger brother. She believes she is in communion with God, but a final, harrowing psychotic break leaves her desolate and betrayed by her own hallucination, having looked at the face of the creator and seen Him morph from benign patriarch to arachnid monster.
"It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it."
Harriet Andersson's portrayal of Karin is magnificent and subtle. At times she is carefree and chipper as a giddy child, comforting her brother and lover (to whom she is no longer sexually attracted) with maternal grace. But her transports of delirium and subsequent account of the nefarious "spider-god" (a theme carried through to Winter Light) are painfully believable. In the cold post-delusional light of day she is partly aware of what has actually transpired (roaming the house at night in a state of psychosexual intoxication, making incestuous advances toward her brother), and her attempts to reconcile this with the hellish illusions of her misfiring brain are heart-rending.
Winter Light follows the metaphysical turmoil of a priest (Gunnar Björnstrand), his spurned lover (Ingrid Thulin) and a faithless fisherman (Max von Sydow). Each is so trapped in their own inescapably selfish anguish that they amplify the suffering of the others.
"The passion of Christ, his suffering... wouldn't you say the focus on his suffering is all wrong?"
The pastor's disgust at his own hypocrisy - preaching fatuous platitudes he has long since ceased to believe in - moves him to reject his lover with a misplaced ferocity that borders on psychological torture. The troubled fisherman comes to the pastor for spiritual help, but finds no comfort from the self-absorbed cleric and kills himself, leaving behind a wife and two children. So solipsistically preoccupied are the pastor and his unfulfilled suppliant that they react to news of the tragedy with indifference.
Björnstrand's and Thulin's performances are stunning. We should hate the pastor for the sadistic relish with which he humiliates his partner, likening her to a "junkyard of circumstance." Yet he is himself so clearly in pain that we cannot but feel some sympathy for him. Thulin, for her part, turns in one of cinema's most moving portrayals of unrequited love as the heartsick schoolmistress. In its way her mind is as unsound as Karin's in the earlier film: the object of her unconditional, disproportionate, non-reciprocal affection is a cold, self-hating husk of a man who feels nothing for her but distaste.
What Bergman suggests in Winter Light is that suffering is, at bottom, a lone activity. Or worse, a virus which begets more of itself in others. Yet there is hope, of a sort. After Thulin's brutal dressing-down by Björnstrand?s priest, she does not break down in the traditional sense. Instead she acquires a grim, metallic resolve. She will not stop loving him, as it is out of her control to do so. But now that she knows he does not love her, she will at least stop wasting time petitioning him. She will abide, see life through to the end. Who knows but that some eleventh-hour happiness awaits her.
Though the first two films have more in common with each other than with The Silence, the third film continues the themes of spiritual desolation and that special kind of hurt that only the beloved can inflict. Two sisters, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and Ester (Ingrid Thulin again) are holidaying in an unnamed Eastern European country with Anna's son Johan. Their hotel appears to be empty except for them, a kindly old concierge and a troupe of Spanish dwarf acrobats.
It is revealed, ambiguously and without a hint of exposition, that there is a seething resentment between the sisters, based on perceived intellectual snobbery (the elder, ailing Ester is better educated), a dark past event involving their father, and Ester's unrequited incestuous love for Anna. Anna feels suffocated by Ester's illness and her and Johan's need for attention, and flees to a club where she picks up and sleeps with a local man. In one of the film's most potent scenes, Anna 'confesses' her hatred for Ester to the man, with whom she does not share a language.
She proceeds to stage another tryst, cruelly inviting Ester to watch. Reprising her character in Winter Light, Thulin's Ester reacts with stoic, static despair, having earlier exhausted her stores of anger and indignation in dealing (mainly through alcohol) with her terminal illness. Johan, too young to feel the animosity of the sisters as anything more than vague disquiet, tries in vain to console both.
The Silence introduces a surrealist tone which attenuates the stifling theatrical atmosphere of the earlier films. The hotel backdrop, the dwarf acrobats and the invented language of the signage and the concierge give the first half-hour an almost Buñuel/Cocteau feel. There is more variety in settings, more motion of Sven Nykvist's camera and of what it's shooting. Whether this benefits the film is debatable - all the baroque scaffolding falls away anyhow as the sisters' mutual hostility escalates.
The film was a censorship landmark because of scenes of nudity and disturbingly graphic sexual dialogue. Even by today's limitlessly permissive standards, it has the power to shock and upset. But once again, there is a hidden moral kernel. In concealing most of the sisters' backstory, Bergman cautions us against judging even the most callous acts. Anna's behaviour seems cruel, but as with the pastor we cannot label her as unconditionally bad because we do not know what happened between her and Ester in the past. We know only that it must have been dreadful enough to kill Ester literally and Anna, delinquent mother and emotional sadist, figuratively.
"I didn't want to accept my wretched role. But now it's too damn lonely. We try out attitudes and find them all worthless. The forces are all too strong. I mean the forces... the horrible forces. You need to watch your step among all the ghosts and memories. All this talk... there's no need to discuss loneliness. It's a waste of time."
In Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Patricia quotes William Faulkner: "Between grief and nothing I will take grief." This paradoxically positivist clamping onto life, however painful, pervades Bergman's masterful trilogy. If you would take grief and pain over nothing, and can see beauty in ugliness beautifully portrayed, these films will leave you reeling with truth.
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