On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Nightmare with Three Dreams Ingmar Bergman's Shame is a war film almost not about war. It is about the condition humaine, for which war serves as metaphor. Eva and Jan...
...In the morning, they frenziedly load a few belongings into the car and head for the sea...
...This woman will not have children, ever...
...The couple have all but accepted war as the natural state of affairs: They hear its percussion, observe troop movements, but are left alone...
...The phone also rings, but whenever Eva picks up the receiver, no voice answers...
...Jan relates a dream he has had: They were back in the symphony orchestra, playing the slow movement of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto (remember the significance of Bach on the radio in The Silence and Personal)—that was peace...
...Yet, for being almost subliminal, these visions are more infernal: They explode not on the screen but, like delayed-action bombs, in your mind...
...who is in command here, spares his friends the Rosenbergs...
...The dead lie in horrible, undignified postures and groupings—death has caught them in flagrante with life, in desperate dalliance with survival...
...The lingonberries will be deposited with the maid...
...Oh God...
...An attempt of the Rosenbergs to make love is foiled by Jan's getting a cramp in his leg...
...As they sit around the table, he becomes momentarily sinister...
...She feels as if she were in a dream, not hers but someone else's (Pascal's God's, we presume), and wonders: "What happens when that person wakes up and is ashamed...
...It is an incomprehensible war, particularly to artists...
...Stumped by that word, she replies, "I don't give a damn what you are, as long as you clean the sink...
...He rises, staggers against a wall, and we see his chest, in ludicrous pajama tops, grievously heaving...
...That night, when Eva asks Jan to join her in her bed, his childlike alacrity makes clear that he is seeking her, and she receiving him, as a mother, not as a wife...
...Jacobi explains that he knows their innocence and that they were hauled in only to set an example to others...
...The couple, tete-a-tete, are lovers again...
...we hear his reiterated "Eva...
...the patrol that came to warn them now counterattacks, and the invaders are drawn away...
...A young deserter surprises them in the greenhouse...
...and then: "The sacred slackness of art...
...Eva and Jan Rosenberg, married seven years and childless, are former philharmonic musicians...
...among thin, puling sobs...
...Reconciled, they finally drive off...
...In this piece of 18th-century porcelain the past comes alive...
...She laughs and exclaims, "Only from a distance...
...his baggy uniform is pathetic, as are his relationship with his housekeeper and his pitiful hope of getting an administrative job because of a bad leg...
...Extreme long shot of the boat adrift...
...Jacobi is captured outside the cottage by Filip, who is a partisan leader, and his men...
...Often a two-shot is held for a very long time, like the one over Jan's shoulder, our gaze riveted on Eva's radiant aliveness...
...And the sound of water dripping from a faucet...
...Jan has a bothersome tooth but exaggerates the pain...
...this only makes her cry harder...
...they talk of having children after the war...
...He pads halfway up the stairs and sits down...
...but he can shoot them with his rifle...
...Beautiful?but an airplane comes and sets the roses on fire...
...A close-up shows their faces, hers slightly above and behind his, filling the screen...
...In a beautiful, perhaps too deliberately composed shot, with chiaroscuro worthy of Georges de la Tour, the two heads bend over the instrument and, with it for hypotenuse, form a triangle...
...finally, the place is burnt down...
...but Mayor (or Colonel) Jacobi...
...the motor breaks down...
...They are now surrounded by the victims of interrogation...
...They drive through a landscape of death, reminiscent of the plague-ridden countryside through which the knight and squire of The Seventh Seal rode...
...but what of the artist...
...It is a kind of Pieta...
...This somewhat self-conscious scene is redeemed by a beautifully humane one...
...Why not make babies right now, he suggests, and adds that he is no determinist...
...Jacobi is revealed as not only shrewd but also tired, defeated: In extreme close-up, his cane pulls an antiquated heater closer to his chilly self, as he tries in vain to concentrate on his newspaper...
...Jan eagerly confirms this...
...In the background, the forest is burning: Hideous balls of fire are climbing up slender, virginal birches and ravishing them...
...but the four of them must get together again one of these evenings to play chamber music...
...But war has transformed Jan from a pacific coward into a belligerent one...
...The station wagon rolls out into the landscape and into a long shot of great and disquieting beauty...
...For a large ransom—they need funds?they'll let him go...
...all men, like unicorns, press their horny heads against her womb...
...All around them armament, bustle, tension...
...mostly there will be sounds of war, or silence—never background music...
...Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand portray the principals...
...Later, in a darkened interior, Jan removes his precious viola from its case...
...Back at the cottage, an idyllic outdoor dinner of fish and wine...
...he has a gun, but drops it from fatigue and hunger...
...We see him come to visit, bringing Eva a family heirloom and Jan a first edition of a Dvorak trio he hopes they will all play someday...
...The couple is roughly questioned about the film they made for the enemy: Another voice has been dubbed in for Eva's, and it spouts collaborationist propaganda...
...Jacobi asks for a loan of the money he just gave Eva...
...Eva runs out of the car to bend over a little girl sprawled out like a discarded doll...
...Some tanks go by...
...Jan dozes off...
...He proceeds to miss one at point-blank range...
...And it's still not awful because it is so beautiful...
...Only with utmost effort can it be extricated from this shoal of clinging dead...
...Eva and Jan fetch the lingonberries they are to deliver to the mayor...
...Liv Ullman...
...Instead of killing the couple, they film an interview with Eva, asking her tough, confusing political questions to which she gives honest but apolitical answers...
...to save her life, she loses her soul...
...Eva refuses to follow Jan...
...at dreadful moments the camera catches innocent children's drawings on the walls or scraps of disused learning on a blackboard...
...Then close-up of Eva's and Jan's adjacent heads, as in a sequence long before...
...After a night of bombardment during which her whiter hand clasps his darker one for comfort, Eva and Jan rise to survey the damage...
...Art survives disaster...
...The camera shoots through the balustrade, disclosing only his legs and feet encased in thick, silly-looking socks...
...A tracking shot (the car) moves relentlessly forward, and the Guernican images it captures are tossed aside as quickly as they are picked up...
...He suggests they take some of the chickens along for food...
...As they make off, the camera briefly catches in the background a pitifully small, black funeral procession heading for a half-ruined church...
...Some are badly hurt, one is a corpse...
...Parting from Lobelius is halting, awkward, full of stabbing silences...
...to prove his political cleanness, he must execute Jacobi...
...End of film...
...That night Eva lies down close to the distraught Jan and tries to warm him with her creature heat...
...the grizzled fisherman...
...The images become extremely sharp, glossy, ripe with chiaroscuro—as we remember them in the dinner party scene in Smiles of a Summer Night...
...Eva rushes to help him, Jan is being cowardly...
...the escapist, thinks it is better so...
...As they withdraw to make love, the man's hand is seen in extreme close-up picking a daisy from the table vase for his lady...
...Everything has become absorbed by the naked, ignoble hunger for this horrible but still lovely life...
...The third dream is the key...
...In his office...
...In one of the most haunting sequences of the film, the two stand incredulous before the devastation around them...
...The camera follows her gesture and pans around the room, picking out statues, pictures, clocks—an anthology of bygone well-being...
...Jan again proves his incompetence...
...More than a gesture of love, it is a pious offering to the goddess of the hearth...
...People who question Bergman's sense of comedy should have their noses rubbed in this scene...
...There is a close-up of Eva's face against an ashen sky, her eyes torn open by grief...
...On the mainland, the Rosenbergs have received enough money to treat themselves to a bottle of wine...
...In exchange for Jacobi's money, Filip, who is sailing the boat, takes on Eva and Jan with the other refugees...
...Amid all this, Eva blurts out the second dream in the film...
...She tells a dream she has had...
...They leave...
...he retorts—and then she does trail after him like a frightened dog...
...Jan hands Eva the money: Again, she just looks at him...
...Not only does the car glisten ominously, the whole landscape has a strident, metallic quality, as if you could cut yourself on the light it reflects...
...They walk through a landscape of scorched tree skeletons even more horrible than the previous one with dead bodies: Nature itself seems to have been exterminated...
...The Rosenbergs, along with many other people suspected of collaboration, are herded into the headquarters of the island authorities who have repulsed the invaders...
...so too, as they sample the German wine they are about to buy, the affability of yesteryear returns...
...Air-to-ground battle: A man parachutes into a tree of the forest that surrounds the cottage...
...One morning they have run aground on what proves to be a floating island of dead men in full fighting gear and life belts...
...Filip hands Jan a gun...
...What Eva has forgotten is the two previous dreams: Jan's memories of Bach and her own righteous indignation against a cruel God...
...Touchy though he is, Jan is in such a good mood, nothing can unsettle him...
...Noises of trucks carrying off the condemned streak across the sound track...
...Hugging her child close, Eva realizes she must remember something someone said—but she has forgotten what...
...Then he sees Eva and Jacobi emerge from the greenhouse...
...That is woman's practical wisdom...
...I'm tired," Eva groans in disgust...
...Eva has to do the accounts and get the car ready...
...his instructions were not to hurt them, and he assumes they were obeyed...
...When, later, she becomes hysterical, he slaps her...
...The sound of the river is one of the very few natural ones that we shall hear on the sound track...
...some of them extreme...
...Through a wooded landscape full of forest fires to a sea that is blocked off by abandoned and destroyed armament—and, suddenly, the corpses of children...
...Lobelius shows his friends his most precious object, a little twosome of Meissen figurines making actual, tinkling music...
...Easier if you stay...
...Jan disclaims any knowledge of it...
...Church bells are heard ringing?mysteriously for a Friday...
...All three watch and listen raptly...
...When we come back to the Rosenbergs, they sit side by side, transfigured...
...The next few sequences are too dense, too rich to be cited in detail...
...Jan bumbles and they have a tiff...
...A cynical doctor ministers to them lackadaisically...
...Eva feeds him...
...and his head...
...He also thought, as he watched Eva get the fish, how much he loved her, how beautiful she was...
...He only took the gauleiter's job, Jacobi explains, out of fear of active combat...
...Food and water run out...
...It does not matter whether she and Jan survive: Those to whom the condition of total war has become the human condition are dead, anyway...
...Eva gently pats a stray curl on Jan's temple...
...comes to rest buried in her lap...
...At dawn...
...There we see Jacobi's head in Eva's lap, just as Jan's had been in an earlier scene...
...Vacant sky and sea keep reappearing as a baleful refrain between shots of this derelict boatload struggling to survive...
...The interior of the shop is tene-brose, yet here Sven Nykvist, Bergman's camera wizard, deploys some of his greatest artistry...
...He tells her the story of Pampini who made this viola and died of the cholera or something—Jan does not remember...
...he kills the boy for his boots and for the place he has reserved on a row-boat leaving for the mainland...
...On the ferry to the mainland they meet the mayor and his wife off to see their soldier son...
...There is a ghastly mock execution scene, more frightening than a real one...
...There are marvelous shots of the Rosenbergs' heads bobbing up and down on a sea of driven humanity...
...Only when Jan has a toothache does he wonder if the dentist is still there...
...It is a Friday morning, with the everyday irritations and petty slop-pinesses encroached on by strange signs...
...The boat creaks as if in pain...
...They now live in an island cottage with an orchard and greenhouse, and sell fruit for a living...
...Jacobi supplies them with various amenities...
...and it remains on the bed as Eva leads Jacobi to the greenhouse where, she says, they must conduct their clandestine intercourse...
...But the paratrooper in the tree is dying...
...can he cut off their heads...
...Like their supporting cast, they are superb...
...She was carrying her little daughter through a strange town...
...Eva —woman, wife, mother...
...His comrades now surround the cottage...
...Filip the fisherman has warned them against this nexus...
...The couple stop by a nervily splashing stream to get a fish for dinner from Filip...
...Another dawn...
...A civil war has been rampaging through the country for years...
...he snorts, thunderously bringing down his cane on the table...
...But also—irony or hope?—there is bird song...
...inscrutable and devouring, war is tolerated as long as it leaves thee and me reasonably unscathed...
...Eva gives him a quick, withering look, which Bergman's camera brilliantly keeps in the middle distance, showing it from Jacobi's observant point of view...
...She tells Jan to drive back home...
...Perhaps life can go on...
...The scene is brilliantly staged...
...They go to Lobelius the antiquarian—the graciousness of wine is now sold along with other antiques...
...Jacobi's body is carted off with cans of food and other loot piled on top of it...
...suddenly she notices a panoply of roses spilling over a garden wall...
...The Rosenbergs' radio has once again not been functioning...
...She, the once pure and strong one...
...Later that evening terrible things happen...
...The sacred freedom of art...
...A bad heart—this, too, will prove partly metaphorical—has kept Jan out of the army...
...The Rosenbergs live in relative comfort now...
...A patrol warns the Rosenbergs about enemy parachutists...
...clear, liquid bird song on the sound track...
...he is too lazy to shave...
...Other people are treated worse than they, though Jan insists that during a brief separation from Eva he was brutally beaten...
...The horror is magnified by the fact that this is a converted schoolhouse...
...Bergman uses the device of shooting a head in very tight close-up, but leaving just enough space around the edges of the frame for suggestions of surrounding upheaval to form an agitated halo...
...Eva asks...
...She refuses it...
...it is not clear whether they return to survive or to perish with their house...
...He, too, is pitiable...
...Eva worries about her husband's potency in the most fondly fumbling way...
...In the bedroom, Jacobi, who has become her lover, hands Eva a large sum of money, his life's savings...
...has capitulated...
...When it is Jan's turn, he collapses...
...Lobelius has been called up...
...The camera has been hovering close to them: a few medium long shots, but mostly close-ups...
...Filip warns Eva about approaching enemy movements...
...Jan wakes up, lights upon the money and perplexedly pockets it...
...Recoiling at first, Jan warms to the task and kills with gusto—in a scene unsurpassable for controlled terror...
...One night, as the others sleep, Filip gives Jan, the only watcher, a leaden, fellow-in-guilt look and quietly slips overboard...
...The cottage is viciously ransacked—even the rare viola and the seemingly invulnerable chickens are now destroyed...
...The Rosenbergs are embarrassed by his presence...
Vol. 52 • January 1969 • No. 1
