Nattvardsgästerna
Ingmar Bergman (1963)
The English title is, for a story set in Sweden ‘in the dark time of the year’, nearly oxymoronic. The Swedish title translates literally as ‘The Communicants’, which may also have a dual meaning. It certainly refers to the handful of people taking communion in the church services that begin and end Winter Light but ‘communicant’ can also be a synonym for ‘communicator’, a meaning that would be doubly ironic in the context of the film. Verbal communication between the two main characters, the pastor Tomas Ericsson and his miserably devoted ex-mistress, the spinster schoolteacher Märta Lundberg, is often piercing: whenever she says something that hits home, he responds with especially cutting cruelty. Communications between the human and the divine, on the other hand, are non-existent. The ‘silence of God’ is more explicitly central to Winter Light than to either of the other films in Ingmar Bergman’s supposed trilogy on the theme.
Winter Light runs only eighty minutes so the events don’t quite take place in real time but there’s an interval of only three hours between the opening and closing church services, conducted by Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) in neighbouring parishes. Most of the action, in spite of the season, happens during daylight, although it’s getting dark by the time Märta (Ingrid Thulin) is driving Tomas to the three o’clock afternoon service. Each service has the same organist – the bored, cynical Fredrik Bloom (Olof Thunberg) – and the same choice of hymns. A churchwarden (Kolbjörn Knudsen) is present for the first of the services and the physically handicapped sexton, Algot Frövik (Allan Edwall), for both. Algot is one of five communicants for the earlier service; the non-believer Märta is another. They are the only members of the congregation at the later one.
For anyone raised (like me) in the Church of England, phrases like ‘there is no health in us’ and ‘miserable sinners’ will easily come to mind watching Winter Light. They apply particularly to the priest. Both as an individual and as the representative of a traditional higher calling, Tomas Ericsson seems to be on his way out. He has lost his faith and is going down with what he says is flu but, from the sound of his graveyard cough, could be something worse. Yet his parishioners still hope and expect their priest to know more than they do and be infinitely stronger. After the first service, two of the communicants, the fisherman Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow) and his heavily pregnant wife Karin (Gunnel Lindblom), come to Tomas. Karin asks the priest to have a reassuring word with Jonas, who’s become obsessed with China’s development of an atomic bomb and is terrified by fear of nuclear war. A little while later in the vestry, Tomas talks with him but is too honest or too self-preoccupied – or both – to provide the comfort sought (in contrast to the different kind of father played by Gunnar Björnstrand, in the last scene of Through a Glass Darkly). Tomas ends up admitting to Jonas that his own faith in God was based in egotism and has now vanished. Jonas takes his leave and, within a few minutes, his own life. Tomas receives the news of this from Magdalena (Elsa Ebbesen), an elderly woman who, only an hour earlier, had taken communion with the Perssons, Algot and Märta.
As a series of gripping individual sequences, Winter Light is exceptional: the taking of communion; Tomas’s talk to Jonas; the priest’s wait beside the fisherman’s dead body before its removal by ambulance; the subsequent conversation between Tomas and Märta. Bergman’s camera, as it moves round the church at the start, suggests a confounding distance between the antique wooden carvings and the present-day worshippers in their prosaic Sunday best. The communicants’ physical attitudes, as they kneel to take the host, are finely observed; so too the boredom of the one child in the congregation and her mother’s respectfully discreet scolding. (In comparison, Fredrik Bloom’s impatient lack of interest in the proceedings – he checks his pocket watch while still playing the organ – is a shade too obvious.) As a searing illustration of the decline of churchgoing, the film seems all the more remarkable (and prescient) in long retrospect. The rigorous naturalness of Sven Nykvist’s lighting seems to expose the characters – to leave them with no place to hide. Bergman’s uncanny ability to make seemingly minor details lodge in the memory is strongly in evidence – the tarpaulin placed over Jonas’s corpse, the movement of wipers to clear snow from a car windscreen, Tomas’s thermos flask.
The lack of rake in the Studio at BFI makes it my least favourite theatre there (a pity since it’s also the newest). Even if the person immediately in front isn’t blocking the view, you’re likely to crane your neck looking upwards. But the size and proximity of the screen in the Studio reinforced the power of the facial close-ups and the pressure of the one-to-one exchanges in Winter Light. The confrontation between Tomas and Märta in the local schoolhouse – in a classroom that’s otherwise deserted, except when one of Märta’s pupils (Eddie Axberg) briefly calls in to retrieve a comic he left in his desk – is emotionally relentless. Tomas, a widower, claims that his late wife was the only woman he ever loved. He uses her as a stick to beat Märta with and his deliberate hurtfulness makes that an apt metaphor. Yet perhaps the most shocking aspect of the exchange is that you understand Tomas’s cruel reaction. Märta’s yearning to be loved by him is almost frighteningly intense – it’s hardly a surprise (though it’s still shocking) that a man as psychologically shaky as he is can resist her snuffling tears and imploring eyes, magnified by the lenses of the rimless spectacles she wears, only by repeatedly and callously rejecting her. Ingrid Thulin, no one’s idea of a mousy spinster, somehow manages to disfigure her beautiful face. She makes Märta’s neediness so oppressive that it’s ugly.
There are times when Bergman’s concentration on the principals’ flaws and preoccupations causes him to skimp on other aspects of the story. The world of Winter Light, as well as reflecting troubled states of mind, is convincing in its actuality – so that the lack of realistic immediate reaction to the horrifying circumstances of Jonas Persson’s suicide feels like an omission. When Magdalena announces that Jonas has shot himself through the head with a rifle and that terrified children discovered his body, Märta appears disturbed only in fearing that the death may have a bad effect on Tomas’s mood, while he absorbs the news as par for the course in a godless universe. Later, Tomas visits the Persson home to inform Karin, who is there with her two young children, of Jonas’s death. The placing of this scene after the one in the schoolroom makes telling the widow seem an afterthought less on Tomas’s part than on Bergman’s. The staging of it minimises Karin’s response to her husband’s suicide: Bergman prefers to stress again the pastor’s inability to help the members of his flock.
Winter Light seems designed to reinforce our sense of the protagonist’s inadequacy but Gunnar Björnstrand persuades us of Tomas’s moral seriousness as well as moral failings. Björnstrand’s impressive, solemn delivery of the liturgy captures the dual power of the words – conveys a sense both of what they’ve meant to those hearing them in times past, and of the depth of loss felt by someone who no longer believes what he’s saying. ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is filled with His glory’ – these are the final lines of the film, spoken by Tomas to a virtually empty church. Björnstrand’s ashen gravitas invests them with abysmal power – at any rate for those who (like me) can’t get religion, or a desire for religious belief, out of their system. Bergman’s public statements about his own loss of faith and how long this continued to matter to him are somewhat slippery; at the very least, the legacy impelled him to make Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. In this later film, he reiterates certain details, or gives short shrift to ideas treated seriously, in the earlier one. Winter Light also contains a disparaging reference to a ‘spider-god’. The father’s ‘God is love’ speech in Through a Glass Darkly is picked up in remarks made to Märta by the organist Fredrik that lead up to a weary, trenchant punchline:
‘God is love and love is God. Love proves the existence of God. Love is a real force for mankind. You see, I know the drill.’
Allan Edwall’s Algot seems simple-minded at first but increasingly canny in the later stages of the film, when he offers a different kind of sacrilegious insight. Algot asks Tomas why there’s such an emphasis in the gospels’ crucifixion stories on Jesus’s physical suffering rather than on his spiritual anguish – betrayed by his disciples, abandoned by the silent God. Algot suggests that his own medical condition has resulted in worse, because much longer-lasting, physical pain than Jesus endured. I’m not sure there is such an emphasis in scripture (as distinct from in religious art and Christian iconography) but Algot’s observations are a welcome, down-to-earth human touch: he’s hardly the first person to have wondered if Jesus’s physical agonies were uniquely terrible. This may even strike a chord with the now large majority in the audience who don’t need or want religious faith – and to whom the spiritual contortions of other characters in Winter Light are liable to come across as antiquated and even tiresome. To someone who’s grown out of religion, the ambiguous words of the unbeliever Märta, as she impulsively goes down on her knees in the dark church in the closing minutes of the film, may be especially puzzling:
‘If only we could feel safe and dare show each other tenderness. If only we had some truth to believe in. If only we could believe.’
These sentiments are very different from those in the long letter that Märta writes to Tomas earlier, in which she describes her own family as warm, loving and irreligious – says, in other words, that tenderness isn’t dependent on the security afforded by belief in something beyond itself.
Märta is falsely encouraged when, unseen by the two men, she listens in on what Tomas says to Jonas Persson about the advantages of atheism:
‘Life would become understandable. What a relief. And thus death would be a snuffing out of life. The dissolution of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness, fear. All these things would be straightforward and transparent. Suffering is incomprehensible so it needs no explanation. There is no creator. No sustainer of life.’
In this scene, Winter Light‘s most formidable, it’s the priest who feels compelled to unburden himself – to a layman in urgent need of comforting counsel. Tomas prolongs the interview even when Jonas says he must get home or his wife will be worried. Tomas’s monologue is a virtual soliloquy: as he reaches the climax quoted above, he is self-absorbed – his stricken face only occasionally looks towards Jonas, who stands with his back to the priest and his face to the camera. Tomas hardly convinces himself of the truth of what he’s said – his first words after Jonas has exited are ‘God, why have you forsaken me?’ – but he has convinced the fisherman that life isn’t worth living. (It’s surely no coincidence that Jonas Persson is in the same line of work as Peter and other disciples of Jesus, before their lives as ‘fishers of men’. Come to that, Tomas is a cold fish – if there is such a thing in Swedish.) Max von Sydow, no less than Gunnar Björnstrand, is superb here. The indelible heroic impression he made in The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring tends to overshadow von Sydow’s work in character roles like Jonas. The knight who played chess with Death is tragically convincing as a frightened man, suffering in near silence, in a belted gabardine mac.
30 January 2018