Skammen
Ingmar Bergman (1968)
In the opening scene, two sleepers are woken by their alarm clock. The woman promptly gets out of bed, washes and dresses. The man, emerging more slowly, puts on spectacles, takes a tablet and a desultory look at a newspaper, starts fretting about a wisdom tooth that’s giving him trouble. This early-morning behaviour nicely encapsulates the personalities of Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max von Sydow) as they’re expanded upon in the early scenes of Shame: she’s often impatient with him and assertive; he’s prone to panic and nostalgia. But the circumstances of the couple’s lives then bring out startlingly different qualities.
Jan and Eva Rosenberg, both orchestra violinists, have left the urban world for an island where they work a smallholding, keeping poultry and growing vegetables. (Like The Passion of Anna (1968) and Hour of the Wolf (1969), its next-door-neighbours in the Bergman filmography, Shame was shot on Fårö.) A war is going on and the couple’s supposed rural refuge soon is no longer a safe place. Military aircraft fly past; a persisting rumour that troops will arrive on the island is realised; on the Rosenbergs’ visit to the nearest town, they spend time in an antiques shop with the owner Lobelius (Hans Alfredson), from whom they also buy wine; Lobelius, though by no means young, has just learned of his conscription. No sooner have they returned home to drink the wine than their property is bombed and the couple captured. While being held, they’re interviewed on camera by a military journalist. Colonel Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand), former mayor of the island, arranges for the couple’s release.
Shame is an apparently political film to an extent unusual for Bergman. The opening titles are accompanied by sounds of gunfire and a crackly radio that tunes in and out of successive stations; an American then a Russian voice registers among the babel of news reports heard as wavelengths change. The scenes of physical conflict (‘employing miniature models’, according to Wikipedia) are vividly convincing. Yet as the story proceeds the nature of the conflict taking place becomes increasingly abstract, shorn of detail about competing political allegiances and military objectives. Since there’s no evidence of other countries involved, it may be a Swedish civil war but that seems hardly the point. The emphasis is much more on the unheroic effects of war on people – in the cowardly or treacherous things they’re prepared to do, more occasionally in how the loss of old pleasures and certainties sharpens regretful appreciation of these. Lobelius brings out his pride and joy, an eighteenth-century Meissen musical box, to show Jan and Eva. Jacobi fondly recalls an evening seeing his son and grandson together.
Those moments of sad retrospection carry little weight, though, beside the duplicities in evidence. When the Rosenbergs are captured a second time and interrogated, their captors play film of that earlier interview: what Eva actually said has been dubbed over with incriminating words that she didn’t speak. This serves not only to illustrate the distortions of propaganda but also to suggest what the characters will prove capable of under duress. Jacobi exploits Jan and Eva’s dependence on his good offices to become a persistent, unwelcome visitor to their home. The climax to his manipulation of the couple sees Jacobi persuade Eva to have sex in exchange for his bank account savings; while they’re otherwise engaged, Jan comes across, understands and pockets the wad of notes. When enemy soldiers descend on the house to arrest Jacobi, he asks for the money back to purchase his freedom. Jan denies all knowledge of it. After conducting a fruitless search of the place, the soldiers hand Jan a gun and instruct him to kill Jacobi, which Jan does. The marriage of Eva and Jan seems fragile from the start: as well as despising his craven nature, Eva is oppressed by their childlessness. Appalled by what he has now done, Eva virtually stops speaking to her husband. When a young soldier appears on the scene, she wants to feed him and let him sleep. Jan abducts the soldier and shoots him dead.
The money acquired from Jacobi enables Jan to buy seats on a boat which will carry him and Eva to asylum outside the war zone. Eva’s disgust with Jan isn’t enough to stop her accompanying him on the sea voyage, on a small craft packed with other prospective refugees. Out at sea, the boat’s motor fails and the helmsman takes his own life by lowering himself overboard. The boat is brought to a standstill by a mass of dead bodies floating around it. The corpses barely register as human; they’re distinguishable only by the different numbers of the knapsacks they’re carrying. Eva finally breaks her silence by telling Jan of a dream she’s just had – of walking down a city street, with a lovely, shaded park. The idyll is broken by aircraft that set fire to the city. Eva is holding in her arms the child she has always wanted. They watch the roses in the park burning, a sight which ‘wasn’t awful because it was so beautiful’. In her dream, Eva felt there was something she should remember but could not.
Jan and Eva have next to no understanding of, or interest in, the causes of the events that come to govern their behaviour. Since these increasingly unsympathetic protagonists are classical musicians, it’s hard not to wonder if Shame is intended as a critique specifically of the disengaged, apolitical artist. The film is tonally very unlike most Bergman and I find it hard to engage with. (This was the second time I’d seen it.) What happens isn’t always convincing: it stretches credulity, for example, that the soldiers searching for Jacobi’s money don’t check that Jan doesn’t have it on his person. The acting is excellent, though, and there are plenty of powerful images – especially that sea of dead bodies in Shame’s remarkable finale.
13 April 2022
