Another film from Ingmar Bergman focusing on existential angst, and which has some pretty bleak commentary on life. It's one that you probably have to watch as symbolically as literally, and while it's dark, I found the balance between the two to be good, and the film to be thought-provoking. The isolation of the island that the four main characters live on, with all of its cruelty and harsh conditions, resembles the isolation of the human condition, and we see four unique responses to it, all of them troubling. Amidst their personal turmoil, we also see scenes of animal slaughter taking place at the hands of some psychopath loose on the island, and hear about the torture of a guy falsely accused of the crime at the hands of a mob. Fun stuff, eh? Hey, pass the popcorn!
In an excellent dinner party scene early on, with the camera focused in turn on each one of the main characters for an interval, we get an insight into their varying personalities, which I saw as being marked by idealism, insecurity, isolation, and indifference:
The real world is still out there beyond this little island, albeit visible only through grainy TV reception, and it's equally horrifying. Just as in 'The Silence', what we see is a glimpse of warfare - though here it's one of the most difficult to watch scenes from the Vietnam War, that of a South Vietnamese soldier matter-of-factly shooting a Viet Cong POW in the head. We don't actually see the bullet fired in the film, but viewers at the time would have been well familiar with the horror of this imagery.
All of these characters are seeking refuge from the difficulty of life, and by wrapping themselves up in one coping mechanism or another, they're lying to themselves or to those around them. I see a spectrum of awareness to life's horrors, ranging from Anna (unware and naïvely delusional), to Eva (somewhat aware), to Andreas (aware and depressed), to Elis (aware and not giving a crap). Is this how we progress in our views over the course of our lives?
With the possible exception of Eva who is the most sympathetic, I don't think I'd want the world populated with characters of these four types, but a little voice within me asked "but is it?" as I thought of that. Bergman at 51 seems to think so. He underlines this further by giving Andrea's character an aspect of repetition, both in having the same name as Anna's old husband, as well as in the last line from the narrator, seen as von Sydow paces back and forth as if trapped in an existential box: "This time he was called Andreas Winkelman." Brutally, brutally stark.
Here's the long quote, from Andreas (Max von Sydow): "It's terrible not being fortunate. Everybody thinks they have the right to decide over you. Their benevolent contempt. A momentary desire to trample something living. I'm dead, Anna. No, no, I'm not dead. That would be too melodramatic. I'm not dead at all. But I live without self-respect. I know that sounds silly - pretentious - since almost all people are forced to live without self-worth. Humiliated to the core, stifled and spat upon. They just live. They know nothing more. They know no alternative. Even if they did, they would never reach for it. You understand?
Can you be sick from humiliation? Is it a disease we're all infected by and we have to live with? We talk so much about freedom, Anna. Isn't freedom a terrible poison for the humiliated... or is the word 'freedom' only a drug the humiliated use in order to endure. I can't live with this. I've given up. Sometimes it's unbearable. The days drag by. I feel like I'm choking on the food I swallow, the crap I get rid of, the words I say. The light - the daylight which comes every morning and yells at me to get up. Or the sleep which always brings dreams, chasing me back and forth. Or just the darkness rattling with ghosts and memories. Has is ever occurred to you, Anna, that the worse off people are, the less they complain? Eventually they're silent... even though they're living creatures with nerves, eyes, and hands. Massive armies of both victims and executioners. The light which rises and sinks heavily. The cold approaches. Darkness. The heat. The smell. And everyone is silent. We can never leave this place. I don't believe in escape. It's too late. Everything's too late."
In an excellent dinner party scene early on, with the camera focused in turn on each one of the main characters for an interval, we get an insight into their varying personalities, which I saw as being marked by idealism, insecurity, isolation, and indifference:
- Idealism - Anna (Liv Ullmann). This character has responded to her husband and child's absence by wrapping the story of her marriage up in a rosy vision, but her frequent mention of honest communication and love in marriage are lies, which we know because of a letter that's been discovered. She's also called out by Adreas for her mourning of a friend's death, which he says is "nothing but theatrics." Is she being hypocritical or he being cruel, or both? Perhaps the closest thing we see to reality with her is in a dream sequence, which has a brilliant long shot from Sven Nykvist and the narration "I was alone on the road. I felt a terrible longing for companionship, for an embrace, for rest. And at the same time, I knew this was gone forever."
- Insecurity - Eva (Bibi Andersson). Even though she's well capable of expressing herself, it was telling to me that when she's asked if she believes in God, she turns briefly to her husband and asks "Do I believe in God, Elis?" Her best lines come later, when she's with Andreas and says "It's difficult when you realize one day you're completely meaningless. That nobody needs you, even though all you want to do is give."
- Isolation - Andreas (Max von Sydow). His character is the one that has the clearest signs of angst. He is so broken and finds it so difficult to get along with people, let alone be in in a relationship, that he prefers lonely solitude. He has a long, despairing speech towards the end which I quote below, and like Ingrid Thulin's character in 'The Silence' (1963), he fears death and is haunted by "ghosts and memories." Lest we feel bad for him, though, in one scary moment he comes at Anna with an axe, and then beats her. He is clearly capable of the great violence we're aware of others committing in the film, and as he seems to represent an "Everyman" of sorts, there is certainly a comment in that.
- Indifference - Elis (Erland Josephson). To me, while he has a smaller role, he's the most disturbing of all. We first glimpse his cynicism when he says of a building he's architecting, "It is a mausoleum representing the total futility in which our kind of people live." He collects and carefully catalogs photographs of people in various emotional states, but he is cold and emotionally distant himself. As the actor explains when Bergman breaks the fourth wall and shows an interview clip with him (as he does with the others), "I think Elis Vergerus finds it hypocritical to be horrified by the madness of humans and that it's emotional carelessness to cry out for decency and justice. He's decided that human suffering won't keep him up at night. He feels he's completely indifferent in both his own and others' eyes. And those are the conditions he lives by. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to function." It's the nihilism and uncaring cruelty in that line, "human suffering won't keep him up at night" that is so chilling to me.
The real world is still out there beyond this little island, albeit visible only through grainy TV reception, and it's equally horrifying. Just as in 'The Silence', what we see is a glimpse of warfare - though here it's one of the most difficult to watch scenes from the Vietnam War, that of a South Vietnamese soldier matter-of-factly shooting a Viet Cong POW in the head. We don't actually see the bullet fired in the film, but viewers at the time would have been well familiar with the horror of this imagery.
All of these characters are seeking refuge from the difficulty of life, and by wrapping themselves up in one coping mechanism or another, they're lying to themselves or to those around them. I see a spectrum of awareness to life's horrors, ranging from Anna (unware and naïvely delusional), to Eva (somewhat aware), to Andreas (aware and depressed), to Elis (aware and not giving a crap). Is this how we progress in our views over the course of our lives?
With the possible exception of Eva who is the most sympathetic, I don't think I'd want the world populated with characters of these four types, but a little voice within me asked "but is it?" as I thought of that. Bergman at 51 seems to think so. He underlines this further by giving Andrea's character an aspect of repetition, both in having the same name as Anna's old husband, as well as in the last line from the narrator, seen as von Sydow paces back and forth as if trapped in an existential box: "This time he was called Andreas Winkelman." Brutally, brutally stark.
Here's the long quote, from Andreas (Max von Sydow): "It's terrible not being fortunate. Everybody thinks they have the right to decide over you. Their benevolent contempt. A momentary desire to trample something living. I'm dead, Anna. No, no, I'm not dead. That would be too melodramatic. I'm not dead at all. But I live without self-respect. I know that sounds silly - pretentious - since almost all people are forced to live without self-worth. Humiliated to the core, stifled and spat upon. They just live. They know nothing more. They know no alternative. Even if they did, they would never reach for it. You understand?
Can you be sick from humiliation? Is it a disease we're all infected by and we have to live with? We talk so much about freedom, Anna. Isn't freedom a terrible poison for the humiliated... or is the word 'freedom' only a drug the humiliated use in order to endure. I can't live with this. I've given up. Sometimes it's unbearable. The days drag by. I feel like I'm choking on the food I swallow, the crap I get rid of, the words I say. The light - the daylight which comes every morning and yells at me to get up. Or the sleep which always brings dreams, chasing me back and forth. Or just the darkness rattling with ghosts and memories. Has is ever occurred to you, Anna, that the worse off people are, the less they complain? Eventually they're silent... even though they're living creatures with nerves, eyes, and hands. Massive armies of both victims and executioners. The light which rises and sinks heavily. The cold approaches. Darkness. The heat. The smell. And everyone is silent. We can never leave this place. I don't believe in escape. It's too late. Everything's too late."