Bergman: Some Minor Quibblings

(Photo clipped from the new york times. Looks like time off from gloom for everybody.)

Don't want to write a eulogy instead just a few stray thoughts of dissenting nature. I think it is not just a willingness to tackle "big" and serious questions that make Bergman's films so effective and leave such a powerful impression. It is rather his technical competence and even more important the extraordinary cast of actors that he surrounds himself with that save his films from ridicule and laughter which comes from too much seriousness. Even a marginally less competent director will not be able to pull things off like Bergman does. Even then I don't think there is a any director in film history who is more often parodied, although never without respect.

Another thing that came to my mind was how relevant the questions of soul, existence of God, spiritual isolation, freedom and responsibility are to us living in the early twenty first century? I mean the general human populace, stripped of all individuality and self-identity, mindless herd of consumerist sheep populating the shopping malls and movie multiplexes? It takes me to another weak point I find in Bergman -- his utterly ahistorical and decontextualised portrait of human reality. Some people would say it is his strength, he doesn't clutter what he wants to say with extraneous details. That he is interested only in the essential. If that is so his diagnosis of the human condition can only be called incomplete. Is the problem of faithlessness really that universal and timeless as Bergman claims it is? I think modern literature tackles this question is much more well rounded manner. In fact I have still been thinking of David Cronenberg's Crash, which I saw on Saturday, a film as attuned to the 21st century human life as one can be (a cinema of the body as opposed a cinema of the soul), and even there I found Cronenberg's hesitant approach to tackle his subject in a more direct and political manner a little disappointing.

Lastly, much as we would like it otherwise, we can't escape the fact that we live in the age of irony. You can't say something and also hope that people think you mean it. That is asking too much. Again Bergman pulls it off because of his extraordinary craft. Not the stuff of lesser filmmakers. (Even in fiction I often see critics bewailing the lack of story, characters and believable psychology in modern literature and longing for the comforts and the securities of the victorian fiction. Needlessly to say I find these very irritating too.) In movies I don't see any example more eloquent than Lars von Trier's reworking of Dreyer's Ordet into his own Breaking the Waves. The austerity, sincerity and seriousness of Dreyer give way to mockery, contrivance and irony in von Trier. This is truly the Ordet we deserve at this time in the history. Asking otherwise is akin to trying to reverse the historical clock. We don't have any Bergman and Dreyer now because we can't have. We'll have to do with von Triers.

Ingmar Bergman's Saraband

Went to see Bergman's Saraband yesterday. It was freezing cold outside but, as I realized later, it was nothing as compared to the coldness of Bergman's world! Saraband is a sequel (of sorts) to Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, a film which I have not yet seen. But in a way, it is not unlike his other late films Autumn Sonata or Cries and Whispers too -- it contains the same emotional brutality and full scale warfare of emotions played almost as a duet (every scene, many of which are almost monologues, has two characters either confessing something painful or hurting each other). I had expected Bergman to have mellowed down with age (he is eighty six now) and get into the romantic, nostalgia mode but I couldn't have been more wrong. His severe, harsh and painful honesty coupled with all the angst will put most of the younger art house filmmakers to shame.

The film almost feels like a filmed theatre. At few places still photographs replace static shots of landscape. Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson reprise their roles from Scenes as the squabbling couple Marianne and Johan, although it seems now they have made peace with life or perhaps they have only passed all the angst and pain to the next generation. Henrik is the middle aged son of Johan from an earlier marriage who is still grieving for his dead wife and is helplessly dependent emotionally on his daughter Karin (played by a young actress who is astonishingly good, perfectly eligible to enter the pantheon of all those Bergman actresses). In fact, the emotional codependency between father and daughter almost borders on incest! All of this, of course, leads to more and more pain in the end.

It is easy to dismiss films like these on the grounds that the characters and scenarios are not "convincing". And of course it is difficult to emotionally "identify" with a character who reads Kierkegaard and listens to Bach and then treats his children in a thoroughly monstrous and callous manner. The father-daughter relationship is also too bizarre to be called "representative". The screening I went to, had a few people even laughing at a few scenes, which I thought were rather painful. Perhaps the laughter was just an emotional defence mechanism. The film is about the costs of emotional honesty and self-examination. It is also about the paradoxical nature of love and freedom -- love which stifles and suffocates (the "sticky" love, as one of the characters exclaims) and freedom which leaves us full of existential angst.

The music box theatre was showing a double bill of Casablanca and Breakfast at Tiffany's on the occasion of the "valentine's day" week. But I chose to see Saraband instead. Not a bad choice at all. Specially given that I would have gone to casablanca alone too ! :)

Link to a review from Chicago Tribune which also explains the meaning of the title.