Winter Light

WINTER LIGHT is the kind of movie that convinces people who've never seen a Bergman film to never see another one.

It's quiet, it's slow, and it's 83 minutes of people thinking and talking, and sometimes the reverse. It's also quite beautiful, in a starkly Scandinavian way, as it grapples with the existential crises that mark Europe's transition to a post-Christian society.

"Eloi Eloi, lama sabachthani?" thrums like a heartbeat through this film's every scene. Gunnar Bjornstrand is a Lutheran minister who died when his wife passed four years prior. He's still giving communion, he's still counseling parishoners, and he's in a relationship with a local schoolteacher; but his heart just isn't in it. His faith had grown fragile during his ministry in the Spanish Civil War, and the loss of his wife was the final blow.

Today, we'd diagnose him with clinical depression, prescribe him something to get his chemistry back on track, and encourage him to aerobicize. That wouldn't make for compelling drama. WINTER LIGHT takes his spiritual unmooring and reflects it in the lives of what few parishioners still bother to show up for services. It gives us not just a man, but an entire culture going through the painful process of breaking away from a millenium of faith and trying to find its way in a new world without apparent answers.

This film provides fertile ground for meditation. Like most Bergman films, I think it will rattle around in my brain for quite some time.

Persona

This week, I'm alone on a business trip. Celebrating my fleeting freedom of action, last night I permitted myself a rare indulgence: a tumbler of Maker's Mark bourbon, a Cuesta Rey cigar, and Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA. It was a tough decision. The local Cineplex is showing 3:10 TO YUMA and SHOOT ‘EM UP, both of which I’d like to see on the big screen. But I don’t often get the chance to watch a whole Bergman movie uninterrupted, and I couldn’t pass it by.

I chose well. While I’m confident that I’ll enjoy 3:10 TO YUMA and SHOOT ‘EM UP when I get around to seeing them, I’ll be shocked if either movie turns out to be as flat-out entertaining as PERSONA. Yep, an hour and a half of two women alone in a summer house, with one of the women uttering exactly one line of dialogue, makes for riveting, consuming cinema – the kind of cinema that makes you forget what time it is, where you’re sitting, even who you are. Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman are just that interesting.

PERSONA begins with a series of WTF images that may explore the history of cinema, the deepest churnings of the unconscious, or even the flotsam and jetsam from which we pull together an identity. From another director, I’d dismiss it as so much self-important wankery, but I’ve seen enough of Bergman’s films to trust the guy’s mastery of dramatic narrative. Thus, I was willing to go where it took me, into a mind-state of disequilibrium and expectation. From there, we meet Ullman, a famous actress who, mid-performance, has chosen to give up interaction with the world and, instead withdraw into herself. Ullman has a fascinating face that, while not exactly beautiful, invites contemplation. What’s happening behind those eyes? How deep is her despair? What does she see that the rest of us don’t? These questions come to consume Andersson, a young nurse assigned to Ullman who agrees with a doctor’s suggestion that she take her patient to the doctor’s beach house for a long recovery (Note: if this is what universal health care looks like, sign me up!).

Once at the beach house, we enjoy a pair of remarkable performances: Andersson all talk and existential longing, and Ullman, all contemplation and, perhaps, wisdom. When a violation of trust collapses the roles and walls between them, PERSONA gives us a brilliant exploration of the nature of identity and the quest for, well, something.

PERSONA is beautiful to watch, another successful collaboration between Bergman and his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. The combination of light and shadow, image upon image, and simple physical composition makes PERSONA a film that surprises and delights from beginning to end.

It’s a whole different kind of entertainment from the offerings down at the multiplex, but it’s flat-out magnificent. I loved every frame.