Riten
Ingmar Bergman (1969)
The Rite (also known as The Ritual) was first screened on Swedish television in March 1969. It subsequently had a limited theatrical release outside Sweden. A judge conducts a series of interviews with three actors – together and individually – to determine whether a part of the show they’re currently appearing in is obscene and renders them liable to prosecution. It emerges from the interviews, and from other exchanges between them, that the actors – known as ‘Les Riens’ – have more than a possibly pornographic stage routine to answer for. They’ve committed speeding offences and avoided paying taxes. Hans Winkelmann (Gunnar Björnstrand), the senior member of the trio, never visits the severely disabled child of his first, broken marriage and has a penchant for bribery. His current wife Thea (Ingrid Thulin), though that turns out not to be her real name, is an emotionally fragile nymphomaniac. Sebastian (Anders Ek) is comfortably the shadiest of the three – a near-alcoholic, a bankrupt and a murderer, who’s lost count of the illegitimate children he’s fathered. The personality of the judge himself (Erik Hell) belies his bureaucratic, small-talking façade: he’s lonely, fearful of death and not in good medical shape. In the climax to the film (which runs only seventy-two minutes), Les Riens perform their controversial act for Judge Abramsson. He dies of apparent heart failure.
As I watched The Rite, I wondered if it was adapted from a piece Bergman had written for the stage. It comprises nine scenes, all of them set in constricted interiors, several in the judge’s office. I wondered if the finale was meant to demonstrate the potential of ritualistic theatre to overwhelm (and annihilate) mundane sensibilities – though that hardly comes over on screen. The performers – the bare-breasted, priestess-like Thea, the two men wearing devil-bird masks and gigantic phalluses over their vaguely medieval costumes – are less intimidating than daftly incongruous in an office setting. It seems I was wrong on both counts. The piece was conceived for television. And according to Peter Cowie’s critical biography of Bergman, the whole point of the lethal ritual is that:
‘… there is no feat, no sleight of hand. Abramsson finds himself terrified more by what might happen than by what actually does (lights out, a spot of mock levitation, wine drinking, and tub thumping).’
The Rite palls well before the actors do their big number. It’s fairly entertaining only when a brisk tone counterpoints what’s being said or done – as when, for example, Hans Winkelmann talks down the virtues of security: ‘Isn’t it better to have insecurity with small artificial islands of security? It agrees better with the real state of affairs than the other way round’. Gunnar Björnstrand’s delivery of this and other expressions of Hans’s cynicism and weltschmerz is amusingly crisp. Björnstrand’s grey-suited, untheatrical dapperness lifts several scenes. In contrast, Ingrid Thulin appears in a succession of hairdos and masks, including a clown’s wig and make-up. Her in extremis acting is characteristically strong but very familiar.
It’s a pity Bergman serves straight most of the gloomy or choleric reflections on mortality, the inevitability of failed human communication and relationships, corrupting legacies of childhood, and so on. In films like Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, he dramatised similar themes to compelling effect through a combination of words and images. In Persona, by way of The Silence, he developed an imaginative, predominantly visual language whereby to probe further. Although photographed by Sven Nykvist, the studio-based The Rite is naturally more limited visually than Bergman’s cinema films of the 1960s. A reversion to merely talking – often moaning – about the horrors of existence is a comedown and, to be honest, a bit of a bore. I’m appalled to say that I missed Bergman’s brief appearance as the priest who hears Judge Abramsson’s confession because I was dozing at the time. Lucky I was able to locate The Rite on YouTube and see Bergman’s cameo without going over the whole film again.
4 March 2018
