Old Yorker

  • Through a Glass Darkly

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Såsom i en spegel

    Ingmar Bergman (1961)

    In the opening scene, four distant figures – three men and a woman – emerge from the sea after a swim.  They laugh as they run towards the shore and the camera.  They sound happy.   What the audience learns within the next few minutes of Through a Glass Darkly ensures that subsequent laughter from these characters is always charged with awareness that it covers more complicated and unhappy feelings.  A while further into the story, they stop laughing altogether.

    The four people are members of the same family – a father, his teenage son and adult daughter, and her husband – on holiday on a remote island off the Swedish coast.  (The film was shot on Fårö, which Ingmar Bergman made his home and where location shooting of several subsequent films, including Persona, took place.)  The widowed David (Gunnar Björnstrand) is a novelist, just back from a lengthy stay in Switzerland, where his new manuscript has been progressing splendidly, or so he says.  Having promised his children that, once returned, he would stay in Sweden, David soon disappoints them by announcing a further trip abroad in the near future.  (It becomes clear that this will be another attempt to cure his writer’s block.)  He disappoints too with the choice of presents he’s brought back for the family, not least because they’re sure he picked them up not in Switzerland but at Stockholm airport, as an afterthought.

    David’s daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), has recently left hospital after treatment for a mental illness.  Early remarks exchanged by her doctor husband Martin (Max von Sydow) and her father paint an optimistic picture of Karin’s condition but it soon emerges that she’s suffering from an incurable form of schizophrenia.  Minus (Lars Passgård), the son, is still at school and preparing for exams, though, as Karin discovers, his Latin grammar book conceals a girlie magazine.  Minus is troubled by the lack of communication between himself and his father, as well as by his sister’s illness.  In one scene Karin incestuously seduces Minus; in another, she refuses to have sex with her loving but frustrated husband.  The film’s action takes place over the course of twenty-four hours, during which Karin’s condition deteriorates; it ends with her departure for hospital, accompanied by Martin, and with a penetrating conversation between David and Minus.  After his father has left the room, the son, in a tone of wondering disbelief, speaks the closing line, ‘Papa spoke to me’.

    Within the Bergman canon, Through a Glass Darkly is often described as the first part of his ‘Silence of God’ trilogy, to be followed by Winter Light and The Silence.  In his memoir Images: My Life in Film, Bergman disowned the trilogy concept but described Through a Glass Darkly, as his ‘first real small ensemble drama’, as ‘lead[ing] the way for Persona’.   The cast of four, essentially a single location, a good deal of dialogue – these basic components might suggest a stage play (and the material has been adapted for and performed in the theatre during the current decade).  Yet, like Persona and other ‘small ensemble dramas’ that followed, Through a Glass Darkly seems not just thoroughly but fundamentally cinematic – it is experienced primarily as a flow of images, from the opening pattern of light on water onwards.  Although Bergman and Sven Nykvist ‘have laughed many a time at our not always successful lighting’, it looks good to this inexpert eye.   Nykvist’s black-and-white photography, in combination with the powerful naturalistic acting, makes all four characters intensely individual.

    Bergman mixes human and divine references to disturbing effect.  Karin experiences God as a vague, comforting hope ‘beyond the door’ of human life but also as a terrifying reality within it – a malignant spider that crawls out of a crack in the wall and wants to penetrate her.   (Peeling, oddly patterned wallpaper seems to mark the threshold between the here-and-now and another plane of being in Karin’s mind.  It makes uncomfortable sense that God, if everywhere, is apprehensible in nooks and crannies.)   The young man who introduced this BFI screening – nervously but clearly, and with welcome brevity – suggested that Through a Glass Darkly shows how much people may expect of parents, as well as of God.  I agree.  The final exchange between David and Minus is as follows:

    Minus:   I can’t live in this new world.

    David:  Yes, you can.  But you must have something to hold on to.

    Minus:  What would that be?  A god?  Give me some proof of God.  You can’t.

    David:  Yes, I can.   But you have to listen carefully.

    Minus:  Yes, I need to listen …

    David:  I can only give you a hint of my own hope.  It’s knowing that love exists for real in the human world.

    Minus:  A special kind of love, I suppose?

    David:  All kinds, Minus – the highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime.  All kinds of love. …

    Minus:  So love is the proof?

    David:  I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or if it’s God himself.

    Minus:  For you, love and God are the same thing.

    David:  That thought helps me in my emptiness and my dirty despair.  …

    Minus:  Papa, if it’s as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God.  We love her so much.

    David:  Yes.

    Minus:  Can that help her?

    David:  I think so.

    According to Wikipedia, Bergman ‘later regretted’ the God-is-love-and-vice-versa message as ‘lacking truth’.  In Images he describes Through a Glass Darkly as ‘a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy’ and ‘a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and an artist’ – striking evidence of how much he saw his cinema as a form of self-expression.  This criticism is surely unwarranted.  The audience may well see David, who articulates the ‘simple philosophy’, as a Bergman alter ego – another in his series of artists damaged by self-centredness.  But we also see him as an independent character whose shortcomings and insecurities are credible – too credible for us to receive what David says in the final scene as a ‘message’ unqualified by personal weakness or the particular circumstances in which it’s spoken.  (I hope Bergman doesn’t really mean us to take a character’s words as simply the writer-director’s own.  Whenever I hear someone announce their motto in life as, ‘This above all: to thine own self be true – as Shakespeare said’, I always want to reply, ‘You mean as Polonius – a pompous professional creep – said’.)

    In the film’s climactic conversation, the great Gunnar Björnstrand doesn’t suggest that the father’s hope is invulnerable.  (We already know that his hope didn’t help David when he decided to attempt suicide during his stay in Switzerland.)  What Björnstrand does suggest is that, in the face of Minus’s crisis, David not only is aware of his paternal responsibility to provide the reassurance his son is seeking but, unusually for him, acts on that awareness too.  Björnstrand also convinces us that David wants to believe what he’s saying, and knows it’s important that his son believes he believes it.  The almost comical irony of Minus’s last line is that a tête-à-tête with his father is so extraordinary that, in itself, it’s almost an epiphany.

    The ‘new world’ in which the son fears he can’t survive is one in which ‘anything can happen’ – the world Minus apprehended earlier in the day, as he and Karin took shelter from an impending storm in the hulk of a ship and she seduced him.  This is where and when, for Minus, ‘Reality burst open and I tumbled out’.  Through a Glass Darkly led the way for Persona in this sense too – as a dramatisation of the necessity and fragility of keeping up an act, and thereby keeping chaos (or a sense of void) at bay.  Bergman equally suggests, in an earlier episode in which the other three perform a short play that Minus has written for David, how dressing up as someone else can be an effective way of conveying a message that you wouldn’t dare deliver more directly.  David, at any rate, interprets the play as an attack on his shortcomings as a father.

    Harriet Andersson is quite wonderful as Karin.  The mixture of disgust and childish disappointment in her face and voice, as she confirms the nature of the deity she’s encountered, is as hard to forget as Andersson’s physically dynamic, frighteningly believable enactment of the spider-God’s attempted invasion.  (The arachnid assault on Karin seems to coalesce in her mind with the insect-like menace of the helicopter, with its whirring propeller and aggressively nattering engine, that arrives to transport her to hospital.)   Once Martin has sedated her, Andersson makes Karin calmly but profoundly defeated as she confirms, ‘I have seen God’.  (It’s the last line that she speaks.)  Martin’s ineffectiveness in the face of his wife’s illness is much more gripping than it might have been with a less imposing actor than Max von Sydow in the role.  In Olympian acting company, nineteen-year-old Lars Passgård acquits himself very well.

    The Bach cello music used by Bergman reinforces the film’s grave beauty.  While its title, in the English translation, is a direct biblical quote (1 Corinthians, 13:12 – ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face …’), the Swedish literally means ‘As in a Mirror’.  I don’t know whether ‘Såsom i en spegel’ is the wording used in the corresponding verse in the Swedish bible but the unnerving religious dimension of Through a Glass Darkly makes a scriptural connotation more than fitting.

    23 January 2018

  • The Final Year

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Greg Barker (2017)

    Greg Barker’s film joins the ranks of recent documentaries whose meanings were transformed by events that occurred during or shortly after the making of them – The Queen of Versailles (2012), The Armstrong Lie (2013), Weiner  (2016).  Barker clearly conceived The Final Year as a valedictory celebration of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, confident that, by the time filming was completed, Barack Obama’s legacy would be more or less safe in the hands of Hillary Clinton.  If she had won the presidential election, Barker’s documentary would amount to little more than a description of the attractive, impressive personalities and hard work of the people to whom he and his crew had access.  They include, as well as the President, senior members of his foreign policy team – Secretary of State John Kerry, Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.  If Clinton were now in the White House, the film would likely have the quality of a public relations exercise for the Obama presidency – reasonably engaging (for political liberals anyway) but, as PR, surplus to requirements because it’s effectively retrospective.  Yet thanks to what happened in November 2016 (ten months into the twelve that end when the Trump team is on the point of taking over), The Final Year has a vector of tragedy.

    The emotional power of the film doesn’t depend entirely on Trump.  John Kerry’s presence supplied a growing regret in this viewer that he didn’t become President in 2004.  To reinforce recognition of the clarity and integrity of his political voice, Barker includes footage of the twenty-seven-year-old Kerry delivering his Vietnam Veterans Against the War evidence to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971.  Samantha Power’s visits to Africa are variously shocking  – from her meetings in a Nigerian refugee camp with women and children driven from their homes by Boko Haram to the upsetting death of a young boy in Cameroon, accidentally killed when he ran in front of the UN Ambassador’s motorcade.  But Ben Rhodes’s immediate reaction to Trump’s win is poignant too.  ‘Just trying to process this’, he says to the camera, ‘there’s a lot to process …’   Words then repeatedly fail this exceptionally articulate man.  Struck dumb, he is The Final Year’s most eloquent image.

    Ben Rhodes is also responsible for a couple of the more light-hearted moments.  He and his bag of work make a meal of squeezing into the back of a car.  Greg Barker does a close-up of the plastic coffee cups and water bottles in Rhodes’s waste bin – as if humorously questioning the administration’s environmentalist credentials.  Rhodes’s major part in the film does, though, raise questions about the relatively little screen time given to his boss Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor.  There are no scenes of interaction between Rice and the President; while there are sign-off bits featuring Obama, Kerry, Power and Rhodes, there isn’t one for Rice.  Perhaps Barker thought it would look odd to include her deputy and exclude her entirely from The Final Year but the effect of Rice’s minor contribution is unfortunate:  this seems like another token movie role for a woman of colour.

    While Barker’s film is designed for a pro-Obama audience, supporters of the new US administration can enjoy it too.   They’ll feel vindicated by the exclusive concentration on foreign rather than domestic policy – nothing is said about the effect of ‘global engagement’ on American jobs and quality of life.  But a majority of viewers (after all, a majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton) will surely feel nostalgic.  Although the outgoing team talks gamely about the pendulum eventually swinging back in their direction, it’s hard, for now, to do more than agree with Ben Rhodes that there’s a lot to process.  The election night sequences in The Final Year, as Samantha Power welcomes Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinem et al to a glass-ceiling-breaking celebration party, revive the sense that what happened then can’t really have happened.  It’s a matter of coming to terms both with Obama’s political legacy being jeopardised and with the astonishing nature of the creature elected to succeed him – not just any old Republican reactionary but, to quote Louis Menand’s description of Trump in a recent New Yorker piece, a ‘toxic nitwit’.

    21 January 2018

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