Daily Archives: Saturday, July 11, 2015

  • The Seventh Seal

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Det sjunde inseglet

    Ingmar Bergman (1957)

    Trying to write about The Seventh Seal is especially difficult.  I can’t do justice to the film – can’t do more than jot down a few thoughts about it.   It’s a work on a huge scale.  I feel that a note of appreciation somehow needs to be small in order to respect that stature.

    This is one of the best films that I’ve seen – perhaps the best.  As far as I know, there isn’t another like it:  The Virgin Spring is its nearest relative in realising a medieval world far removed from the present day yet sufficiently connected to persisting human preoccupations to be thoroughly and powerfully believable.  Bergman developed the screenplay from his stage play Wood Painting (Trämålning):  The Seventh Seal is both essentially cinematic and intensely theatrical.  There are so many memorable elements.  The seascape, an epic visualisation of ‘time not our time’, is the setting for the grimly amusing chess game between Death and the knight, Antonius Block.  As Block, recently returned from the Crusades, Max von Sydow is truly iconic.  He looks to be carved – perhaps from wood (recalling the title of the source material), perhaps, like the chess pieces, from ivory.  On dry land, the Sweden to which Block has returned is being ravaged by plague.  Bergman and his cinematographer Gunnar Fischer create a succession of images which illustrate bestial vitality and post-mortem rot.  Some of these images are shocking, like the fully-dressed corpse the knight’s squire, Jons, comes upon.   As the atheistic Jons, Gunnar Björnstrand supplies a phenomenally witty commentary on the squalid life and pervasive death through which he and the knight travel.  Block and Jons, some of whose verbal exchanges are genuinely funny, are an entirely complementary twosome.  They represent opposing attitudes to life – the squire is an Everyman sceptic, his master is heroic and a believer (or determined to be a believer).  They are also both fully human.  It’s also the human ordinariness of Bengt Ekerot’s features that, in combination with the nerveless suavity of his voice, makes his black-cloaked, white-faced Death such a disturbing figure

    The Seventh Seal is famous for its description of the ubiquitous irresistibility of death and (like several subsequent Bergman films) the silence of God yet the very dominance of these elements heightens your appreciation of the sights and sounds of everyday life in the film.  The tonal range of these is considerable.   There’s the riotous, dissonant soundtrack of the world-out-of-joint folk song performed by the travelling actors (‘mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles’ proceed from their lips).   There’s also the beautiful, quiet interlude in which Block enjoys a simple outdoor meal with the actors Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson) and their infant son Mikael (Tommy Karlsson):  the knight expresses his awareness that he will treasure this transient calm and happiness and the viewer shares his gratitude.  It’s one of the loveliest scenes that I know.   Bergman’s juxtaposition of death and life in the conclusion to the film is masterly – not only in the great dance of death but in the ambiguous ending.  Jof, a simple man yet a religious visionary, Mia and Mikael survive.  The family walks off into the sunrise.  Yet they may be heading in the same direction that the plague is travelling.

    Ingmar Bergman made clear how frightened of death he was when he made the film and, in spite of its brilliant theatricality, The Seventh Seal doesn’t disguise that fear.  It’s interesting to compare Bergman’s candour with the way in which his admirer Woody Allen has repeatedly rendered fear of death – entertainingly, but with an awareness that to present the fear comically is ultimately an evasion if you’re truly scared of death (which many people claim not to be).   In The Seventh Seal, the unanswerableness of death is reflected by thunder and lightning in apocalyptic skies, by the accompaniment of the Dies Irae, by the great emptiness of the shoreline, by the skulls decorating the landscape.  These elements are melodramatic but, for Bergman, nothing less will serve his thematic purpose and their cumulative effect is unique.  The characters in the film live in the particular shadow of death through a terrible plague but their awareness of their eventual fate persists through different times and places.  Bergman is uncompromising too in his presentation of human cruelty and its effects – whether that cruelty consists of making fun of someone (as when Jof, in an inn, is made to imitate a dancing bear and flames lap round him) or killing them (the burning of a witch).

    Although I knew about Bergman’s preceding films, I hadn’t realised, until I listened to Ian Christie’s introduction for this BFI screening in December 2013, how startlingly he changed tack and style with The Seventh Seal.   (And, although it’s very obvious, it hadn’t occurred to me before how much Interiors, the homage to Bergman which represented a comparable shift in Woody Allen’s work, specifically recognises The Seventh Seal with its seaside setting.)   Christie’s introduction was a reminder too that the making of the film was a wonder in itself.   The chess game and the dance of death were shot at Hovs Hallar, a rocky beach area in north-western Scania.  Otherwise, the medieval world was recreated in a small studio overlooked by a 1950s apartment block.

    2 December 2013

  • Happy-Go-Lucky

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Leigh (2008)

    Vera Drake was resolutely optimistic:  that made her unhappy predicament all the more wrenching.  But Happy-Go-Lucky is being promoted as an optimistic Mike Leigh film and therefore as a new departure – although the main change from Vera Drake consists in, for much of the film, a loss of energy.   The optimism is embodied in the main character, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a bubbly North London primary school teacher – but Poppy (real name Pauline) is affable to an excruciating degree:  she’s such a grinning, giggly face-puller that it seems incredible no one, except her misanthropic driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan), tells her to shut up or disappear.  If they did, and we saw the effect on her, the first half of the film might be more illuminating:  as it is, Poppy doesn’t seem interesting enough to give the story the momentum it needs – and Scott is so pathologically and noisily angry from such an early point that the scenes between him and Poppy don’t build.   There’s a risk in Mike Leigh’s way of working that the actors will sometimes spark each other for the sake of it, at a cost to the drama as a whole.  (Vera Drake, with its more strongly structured narrative, was able to avoid that risk.)  There’s also a risk with Leigh’s approach that consciously ‘light-hearted’ moments in his work will stick out as clumsily artificial (the opening here, when Poppy visits a bookshop and, coming out, finds that her bike’s been stolen, is an example).

    Although it includes a visit to desperately social-climbing relatives (Leigh has done this too often by now and usually better), the second half of Happy-Go-Lucky is much better.  Poppy first meets Tim (Samuel Roukin), a social worker, when he comes to talk with a boy in her class who has turned aggressive.  Poppy and the head (Sylvestra Le Touzel, acting in a style unusual for her and better for it) sit in.  The scene is beautifully played all round and the point at which you begin to see how much more range Sally Hawkins has than she’s shown throughout the first hour.  The relationship between Poppy and Tim does build, satisfyingly – so does the description of Poppy’s nuanced, ambiguous friendship with her flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman).  And the fact that these scenes – rather than the arguments between characters – are the best acted parts of Happy-Go-Lucky makes the film’s outlook seem convincingly positive (although not for the first time in a Mike Leigh film – Phil Davis and Ruth Sheen delivered this in High Hopes).  It’s refreshing too to see a positive portrait of a social worker (even if Tim’s solution to the schoolboy’s problems comes too instantly) and a sunny presentation of Camden and Finsbury Park, by Leigh’s long-time cinematographer, Dick Pope.

    19 April 2008

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