The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould in The Touch

Cast: Bibi Andersson, Elliott Gould, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Ann-Christin Lobråten, P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren. Music: Carl Michael Bellman, Peter Covent, Jan Johansson. 

I didn't believe a minute of The Touch, and not just because Elliott Gould was so terribly miscast as the male lead in a romantic drama. The film struck me as formulaic in so many predictable ways, particularly the heavy-handed contrast of the milieu from which Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) comes -- pristine, middle-class, Nordic -- and the one from which her lover, David Kovac (Gould), comes -- sloppy, intellectual, Jewish. There's also a thudding use of symbols, like the long-immured statue of the Virgin and Child that's infested with a species of beetles that has lain dormant until David, an archaeologist, uncovers it. It's a film with nothing new to tell us, or at least nothing that Ingmar Bergman hasn't told us in better films about troubled marriages and destructive love affairs. It was heavily panned on release and a box office failure, but it has since been revived by admirers who find it carefully crafted and subtly unsettling. I admire the craft, including Sven Nykvist's always evocative photography and Andersson's dedicated performance, but it still seems to me a flawed and obvious story.  

Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell, 1966)

Eddie Axberg in Here Is Your Life

Cast: Eddie Axberg, Ulla Sjöblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, Per Oscarsson, Ulf Palme, Signe Stade, Allan Edwall, Max von Sydow, Ulla Akselson, Stig Törnblom. Screenplay: Bengt Forslund, Jan Troell, based on novels by Eyvind Johnson. Cinematography: Jan Troell. Art direction: Rolf Boman. Film editing: Jan Troell. Music: Erik Nordgren. 

Life doesn't have a plot. It's a series of incidents, some causally connected, some not. At least that's the life presented in Here Is Your Life, a coming-of-age story about a boy in Sweden during the years that comprised World War I. (Not that the war had much to do with it in neutral Sweden.) What we see is the emerging consciousness of Olof Persson (Eddie Axberg), a boy who, because his father is seriously ill, was sent to live with a foster family and when he is on the brink of turning 14, goes off to seek his fortune. That takes him first to dangerous places like a logging camp and a sawmill, then to work for a man who runs a movie theater, including a stint as an itinerant projectionist, carrying the camera from place to place. We also see him working on the railroad and trying to organize workers into a strike. Bright and highly literate, he gets his ideas from Nietzsche and Marx, and tries to apply them to the world he encounters. The film ends with Olof, now on the verge of manhood, striking out alone as the camera soars away from him, a tiny figure isolated on the railroad tracks running through a snowy landscape. It's a lovely, disjointed but somehow coherent movie, with enigmatic characters and violent events mixed with mundane but often striking ones. His sexual awakening occurs, too, though not without a bit of violence and confusion there: Once, his rough male coworkers indulge in a bit of horseplay with Olof that verges on rape. Later, he strikes up a friendship with a somewhat older man that has homoerotic overtones when the two swim naked and afterward dance together. The encounters with girls are more typical of the portrayal of growing sexual awareness in film: He falls for a pretty girl but rejects her when he sees her with someone else and a friend tells him she's promiscuous. He deflowers another young girl and leaves her in tears. And he has an affair with a very experienced older woman, marvelously played by Ulla Sjöblom. Yet Troell's film never sinks into clichés or banality, and it's held together by the director-cinematographer-editor's vision and by the steady, attractive performance of Axberg in the key role of Olof. There are also some appearances by such familiar Swedish actors as Allan Edwall, Ulf Palme, Gunnar Björnstrand, and, of course, Max von Sydow. The film's 168-minute length is a bit daunting -- it lost 45 minutes in its American release -- and Troell never spells things out for the viewer, leaving us to explicate the changes in Olof's life on our own. But the epic ambition involved in adapting a quartet of novels by Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson somehow results in an intimate portrait of growing up.    

Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson in Brink of Life

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Sjöberg, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Inga Landgré. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaaksson, based on novels by Isaksson. Cinematography: Max Wilén. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 

For all the frankness of its subject matter, Ingmar Bergman's Brink of Life is as formulaic as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. Three women are sharing a room in the obstetrics ward of a hospital. One of them, Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin), has miscarried and is being treated for bleeding. Another, Stina (Eva Dahlbeck), is in almost the opposite condition: She has gone well past term in her pregnancy and is there hoping that labor will be induced if it doesn't occur right away. The third, Hjördis (Bibi Andersson), is only in her third month, but she has experienced some bleeding -- perhaps, we learn, because she's unwed and doesn't want the baby, so she's been trying to cause a spontaneous abortion. Cecilia is in the throes of depression, blaming herself for the miscarriage because neither she nor her cold, priggish husband, Anders (Erland Josephson), was entirely certain that they wanted a child. Again, Stina is the precise opposite: She's rapturous about having a baby, and so is her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). Between these polarities, Hjördis is fighting with the social worker who is trying to advise her on how she can live after the baby arrives. The best advice is, of course, to go home to her parents, but since she left precisely because she doesn't get along with her mother, she strongly rejects the idea of facing the disapproval she expects to encounter from her. It's all a setup for the kind of plot resolutions you might expect: Cecilia grows stronger and chooses to face up to her disintegrating marriage and a childless future. Stina loses the baby in a prolonged and difficult labor. And Hjördis discovers that maybe her mother isn't so bad after all. There's a feeling of anticlimax about these eventualities. That the film works at all is the product of the performances of the three actresses, along with Bergman's steadily unsentimental direction, which makes the predictability of the story more tolerable than it might be in a Hollywood tearjerker. Still, I can't help feeling that the stories of what happens to Cecilia, Stina, and Hjördis after the film ends would make a more interesting movie.   

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas. Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker.

Shutter Island is two hours and 18 minutes long, and it feels like it. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) is almost as long (two minutes shorter) and it doesn't. Yet Martin Scorsese, who made Shutter Island, is one of the few contemporary directors who are spoken of with much the same reverence as Hitchcock. Granted, comparing the two films is unfair: North by Northwest is meant to be giddy fun, constantly on the move, while Shutter Island is a psychological thriller with horror movie overtones and a claustrophobic setting. So perhaps the more appropriate comparison would be one of Hitchcock's explorations of disordered psychology, Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958). The former comes in at 109 minutes, the latter at just a few minutes over two hours. The point here is that Hitchcock knew how to tighten things up. Scorsese may know how, but he doesn't seem to care. He lets Shutter Island slop around, losing tension and focus in the process, when all he really has to do is guide us to a surprise twist and shocking climax. I seem to be one of the few who feel that the film is a tedious indulgence in material of no great matter: Its psychology is unconvincing, its characters are toys, and its payoff is rather pat and formulaic. Still, it gets a whopping 8.2 rating from viewers on IMdB, so I seem to be among the few who feel that too much acting and directing talent has been expended on too little.

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Léa Seydoux. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.

Did the world really need another Robin Hood movie? From the lack of interest at the box office, it would seem not. At least Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland tried to give us something slightly different: a prequel, in which Robin finds his identity and mission and only at the very end goes off into Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men, presumably to rob from the rich and give to the poor. We've had a sequel before in Richard Lester's 1976 Robin and Marian, in which the aging couple find an end to their adventures. (Interestingly, the Robin Hood of Lester's film, Sean Connery, was 46 when it was made, the same age that Russell Crowe was when he made Scott's. Lester's Marian, Audrey Hepburn, was 47, and Scott's, Cate Blanchett, was 41.) Unfortunately, the prequel doesn't give us much that's new or revealing about the characters: The villains, King John (Oscar Isaac) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen), remain the same, with an additional twist that they're being duped by another villain named Godfrey (Mark Strong), a supporter of the French King Philip, who is plotting an invasion now that the English army is still straggling back from the Crusades. Robin is a soldier of fortune named Robin Longstride, who has been to the Crusades and is making it back with the crown of the fallen Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as well as a sword he promised the dying Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) he would return to his father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham.  When he does, Robin meets Marian, no longer a maid but the widow of Sir Robert. On the way, he has gathered a retinue comprising Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), and in Nottingham he will add Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) to the not terribly merry company. They'll take part in repelling the French invasion, which Scott makes into a kind of small scale D-Day, to the extent of borrowing unabashedly from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), including some landing craft whose historical existence has been questioned (along with much else of the movie's history). Robin and his fellow soldiers, including Marian, who arrives disguised in chain mail, save the day, but their hopes for a new charter of rights that has been promised them by King John are dashed when he proclaims Robin an outlaw. So everything seems to be set up for a sequel that will culminate at Runnymede and the signing of Magna Carta, but the film's flop at the box office put paid to that. Robin Hood certainly has some good performances, which you might expect from its cast packed with Oscar-winners and -contenders, but it feels routine and a little tired. It also resorts to filming much of the action with the now too common "gloomycam," in which fight scenes always seem to be taking place at night, so you can't tell who's killing whom.

The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)

Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren.

Sometimes linked with Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Shame (1968) as a third element of a trilogy set on Fårö island, Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna is a characteristically intense working out of themes of grief and guilt, involving two couples whose lives intersect against a backdrop of mysterious instances of cruelty toward animals. I find it one of Bergman's more forgettable films, but it has strong admirers. 

Miss Julie (Alf Sjöberg, 1951)

Anita Björk, Märta Dorff, and Ulf Palme in Miss Julie

Miss Julie: Anita Björk
Jean: Ulf Palme
Kristin: Märta Dorff
Countess Berta: Lissi Alandh
Count Carl: Anders Henrikson
Viola: Inga Gill
Robert: Åke Fridell
Julie's Fiancé: Kurt-Olof Sundström
Farmhand: Max von Sydow
Governess: Margarethe Krook
Doctor: Åke Claesson
Julie as a child: Inger Norberg
Jean as a child: Jan Hagerman

Director: Alf Sjöberg
Screenplay: Alf Sjöberg
Based on a play by August Strindberg
Cinematography: Göran Strindberg
Art direction: Bibi Lindström
Film editing: Lennart Wallén
Music: Dag Wirén

"Opening up" a play when it's made into a movie is standard practice. Directors don't want to get stuck in one or two sets for the entire film, so they shift some of a play's scenes to different locations or have new scenes written. But nobody has done it with such imagination and finesse as Alf Sjöberg, taking August Strindberg's Miss Julie out of the kitchen in which the play confines the characters and into the other rooms of the house and onto the grounds of the estate. Sjöberg plays fast and loose not only with space but also with time, giving us scenes from the childhood of some of the characters, showing us the cruelties that warped them into the twisted adults they have become. But he also does it by letting the characters from the past appear in the same room as their equivalents in the present, giving a sense of the indivisibility of past from present. Granted, Strindberg's play, with its long reminiscent speeches, facilitates this reworking of the drama by providing the material for Sjöberg's added scenes, but there's a fluidity to Sjöberg's melding of memories into the tormented present of Julie and Jean. There are some who argue that Miss Julie is meant to be a claustrophobic play, that dramatizing too much of Julie's relationship with her mother or Jean's early lessons in not transgressing the limits of class undermines the play's psychological realism with too much action and melodrama. The answer to this, I think, is that the play remains, and continues to be performed with success -- and, incidentally, to be filmed repeatedly in ways more faithful to Strindberg's original plan. What we have with Sjöberg's film based on Strindberg's play is a second creation, rather the way Verdi's Otello and Falstaff can stand on their own as masterpieces without denying the virtues of the Shakespeare plays on which they're based.

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

Linda Blair, Max von Sydow, and Jason Miller in The Exorcist

Chris McNeil: Ellen Burstyn
Father Damien Karras: Jason Miller
Regan McNeil: Linda Blair
Father Merrin: Max von Sydow
Lt. William Kinderman: Lee J. Cobb
Sharon: Kitty Winn
Burke Dennings: Jack MacGowran
Father Dyer: William O'Malley
Karl: Rudolf Schündler
Willi: Gina Petrushka
Karras's Mother: Vasiliki Maliaros
Demon's Voice: Mercedes McCambridge

Director: William Friedkin
Screenplay: William Peter Blatty
Based on a novel by William Peter Blatty
Cinematography: Owen Roizman
Production design: Bill Malley
Film editing: Norman Gay, Evan A. Lottman
Makeup: Dick Smith

From classic to claptrap, that's pretty much the range of critical opinion about The Exorcist. I tend toward the latter end of the spectrum, feeling that the novelty of the film has worn off over the 45 years of its existence, revealing a pretty threadbare and sometimes offensive premise. It was at the time a kind of breakthrough in the liberation from censorship that marked so much of American filmmaking in the early 1970s. Audiences gasped when Linda Blair growled "Your mother sucks cocks in hell" with Mercedes McCambridge's voice. Today it's little more than playground potty-mouth behavior. The pea soup-spewing and head spinning now draw laughs when they once had people fainting in the aisles. We can argue that there was something noble about those more innocent times, and that we've lost something valuable in an age when the president of the United States can brag about pussy-grabbing and denounce shithole countries and still retain the loyalty and admiration of a third of Americans. But isn't it also true that the move from a horror film based on religious superstition to a horror film like Jordan Peele's Get Out, nominated like The Exorcist for a best picture Oscar, represents an improvement in our taste in movies? Get Out at least has a keenly satiric take on something essential: our racial attitudes. The Exorcist makes no statement about the value of religious faith, unless it's to suggest that it's based on a desire to scare us into believing. To my eyes, The Exorcist is slick but ramshackle: William Peter Blatty's Oscar-winning screenplay never makes a clear connection between Regan's possession and Father Merrin's archaeological dig in Iraq. (The opening scenes of the film were actually shot in the environs of Mosul, which today has succumbed to a different kind of evil.) There are some scenes that make little sense: What's going on when the drunken film director taunts Chris's servant Karl with being a Nazi? What's the point of introducing the detective played by Lee J. Cobb with his usual self-absorption? Some of the plot devices, such as Father Karras's guilt over his mother's death, are pure cliché. And who the hell names a daughter Regan? Was Chris hoping for another kid she could name Goneril? For thousands of moviegoers, however, these objections are nitpicky. For me the flaws are the only thing that remain interesting about The Exorcist.  

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Tomas Ericsson: Gunnar Björnstrand
Märta Lundberg: Ingrid Thulin
Karin Persson: Gunnel Lindblom
Jonas Persson: Max von Sydow
Algot Frövik: Allan Edwall
Fredrik Blom: Olof Thunberg

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editing: Ulla Ryghe

I have to admit that I was seduced into nostalgia by the opening of Winter Light, as the liturgy and communion service brought back memories of my Methodist childhood. But the mood vanished swiftly as the chill reality of the film took hold: The church is cold and nearly empty, most of its congregants brought there by necessity or duty. The pastor is a hypocrite with a head cold, unable to muster enough enthusiasm for his faith to keep a man who comes to him for counseling from blowing his head off with a shotgun or even to console his widow. His former mistress, the local schoolteacher, is as comfortable in her atheism as he is uneasy in his attempts to believe. It's Bergman at his bleakest, though paradoxically filled with a kind of existential affirmation. The message boils down to: Don't sweat the big stuff. That is, don't let theology get in the way of going on with your life. You can respond to this kind of message in three ways: With stubborn denial, with an exhilarated sense of liberation, or with a painful feeling of loss. Winter Light is a talky film, one that sometimes seems more fit for the stage than for the movies, but its characters are alive and complex, its performances uniformly superb, and its images -- supplied by the great Sven Nykvist -- sometimes even more articulate than its dialogue.

Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in Shame

Eva Rosenberg: Liv Ullmann
Jan Rosenberg: Max von Sydow
Jacobi: Gunnar Björnstrand
Mrs. Jacobi: Brigitta Valberg
Filip: Sigge Fürst
Lobelius: Hans Alfredson

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editor: Ulla Ryghe

One of Ingmar Bergman's bleakest and best films, Shame is unencumbered by the theological agon that makes many of his films tiresome (not to say irrelevant) for some of us. It's a fable about a couple, Eva and Jan, two musicians seeking to escape from a devastating war by exiling themselves to an island. At the start of the film their life is almost idyllic: Their radio and telephone don't work, so they remain in blissful ignorance of the problems of the world outside. He's a bit scattered and idle; she's practical and businesslike. They quarrel a little over their temperamental differences, but they have developed a self-sustaining life, raising chickens and cultivating vegetables in their greenhouse. But needless to say, no couple is an island: The war comes to them. When they take the ferry into town, selling crates of berries and stopping to drink wine with a friend who has just been drafted, they begin to be aware that the larger conflict will not remain at a distance for long. There will be no retreat for them into the simple life. Under the pressure of war, their relationship changes: Eva becomes more careless, Jan loses his passivity. In the end, desperate to flee the despoiled island, they join a group on a fishing boat heading for the mainland only to wind up in a dead calm -- a literal one, for they are stuck in a sea filled with corpses, an image that, because so much of the film is straightforward in narrative and imagery, manages to avoid the heavy-handedness that often afflicts Bergman's films. There is also, for Bergman, a surprising lack of specificity about the war in the film: There are no direct allusions to particular wars, such as World War II, the one that raged in his childhood, or to the war of the day in Vietnam -- there are no images of burning monks as in Persona (1966). The war of the film is generic -- soldiers, planes, trucks, and tanks lack insignia and the names and nationalities of the two sides are never mentioned. It's as if war is an ongoing condition of the human race.

Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf is unquestionably a "horror movie" -- i.e., one filled with incidents and images and narrative details aimed at shocking the viewer. It takes place on a remote island with a mysterious castle. Figures appear who may be either humans or demons. There's a scene in which a man walks up the wall and across the ceiling and one in which a woman peels off first her wig and then her face. The protagonist either murders or imagines that he has murdered a small boy. That protagonist is Johan Borg (Max von Sydow), an artist, who has come to the island with his wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), to recover after an illness -- physical or mental, we're not told. Johan can't sleep, and Alma sits up with him at night while he tells her about the demons whose images he has sketched, so no wonder that her own mental state becomes fragile. One day, she meets an old woman who tells her that she should read Johan's diary, which he keeps under his bed. She does so, rather like Bluebeard's wife persisting in opening his castle's doors, uncovering some disturbing entries regarding his continued obsession with an old love, Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin). They're invited to a dinner party at the castle by the baron (Erland Josephson), where they meet a variety of unlovely sophisticates and are entertained by a rather bizarre puppet show excerpt from Mozart's The Magic Flute (an opera that Bergman would film, in a less bizarre manner, seven years later). But the climax of the evening comes when the baroness (Gertrud Fridh) takes the Borgs to her bedroom to show off her prized possession: Johan's portrait of Veronica Vogler. From then on, it's a deep descent into madness for Johan and a desperate attempt by Alma to save both of them from self-destruction. The "creep factor" in Bergman's movies is never entirely missing, but Hour of the Wolf cranks it up higher than ever. The problem is that the creepiness is sustained almost to the point of tedium, and with a concomitant loss of credibility. The remote island setting prevents the film from grounding itself in normality, so that the action plays out on one sustained note of oppressive isolation. Hour of the Wolf has many admirers, who rightly point out that Bergman, with the considerable help of his actors and his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, has crafted a nightmare of erotic obsession with the utmost skill. But I like to compare Hour of the Wolf to another horror movie released the same year, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, a "commercial" product aimed at a general audience, which suggests evil things going on beneath the surface of a commonplace urban setting, and ask which is the more successful: the sustained psychological oppressiveness of the Bergman film or the sinister mixture of comedy and shock of the Polanski movie?  

Europa (Lars von Trier, 1991)

Jean-Marc Barr and Barbara Sukowa in Europa

We're accustomed to movies, usually blockbuster action films, in which the feats of filmmaking technology are more impressive than the narrative or characterization, but it's startling to find that kind of disjunction in a supposedly serious art-house film. That's what happens in Lars von Trier's Europa*, however. The film's visual tricks -- front and rear projection, double exposures, juxtapositions of black-and-white and color -- linger in the mind longer than any of the characters or the story. At base, Europa is a thriller, set in Germany in 1945, about an idealistic young American, Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), whose German uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) gets him a job as an apprentice conductor on the Zentropa railway line. Leo is an idealist and a pacifist (the film is rather vague about what he did during the war) who wants to help Germany recover, but this only makes him putty in the hands of various opportunists, from the American military to the railway owners to an underground group of die-hard Nazis known as "werewolves." Things grow more complicated for Leo when he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), whose father, Max (Jørgen Reenberg), owns Zentropa and is undergoing scrutiny in the "denazification" efforts by the occupying Allied forces. This is standard, even promising, thriller material, and to a large extent von Trier and co-screenwriter Niels Vørsel deliver on its premises. There are moments of suspense and surprise -- especially the assassination of a newly appointed Jewish mayor by a young boy planted on the train by the werewolves -- that would do any thriller writer and director proud. And it has to be said that the general atmosphere of the film, a lingering sinister darkness and chill, is effectively produced. But the tarting up of the story with gimmicks takes me out of the narrative and into a concentration on the effects. For example, there's a scene in which Katharina, in monochrome, is standing behind Leo, who is in color, until she walks out of the frame and re-enters next to him, both now in color. Then Leo leaves the frame and re-enters, now in monochrome, behind her. I know how it's done -- rear projection and careful storyboarding -- but I remember the effect, and not anything that was said by the characters while the trick was taking place. Something of the same could be said about the frame in which von Trier sets his story: The film begins with a shot of railway tracks lighted by a moving train and the voice (Max von Sydow's calm baritone) of a man hypnotizing someone: "You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa...." The voice recurs throughout the film until it's clear that the "you" is Leo. As for the "Europa" into which Leo is being guided, von Trier has explained that he had Franz Kafka's satirical fantasy Amerika in mind while making the film. The framing, I think, freights the story with more significance than anything that actually appears in the film. Von Trier has said that Europa is something like "Hitchcock in a Tarkovsky setting," which is nothing if not overreaching.

*Europa was released in the United States in 1992 under the title Zentropa to avoid confusion with Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa, which had been released in 1991 in America. Von Trier also named his production company Zentropa, which is the name of the railway company in his film.

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

Back in the day, by which I mean the early 1960s, The Seventh Seal was one of the films -- along with Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) -- that you had to have seen just to be considered culturally literate. Its stock has fallen considerably since then, thanks to a distaste for Ingmar Bergman's inquiries into faith. I hadn't seen it for many years until I decided to watch it last night, and I was expecting my reaction to be similar to the one I had recently watching Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961): too much talking, not enough showing. I had, in fact, remembered very little from The Seventh Seal beyond the knight playing chess with death and the final dance of death across the horizon -- both of which have been parodied and copied ever since. And it is, still, much too talky: Epigrams about God and Death pile up on one another tiresomely.  But I had forgotten how human a fable it is. I think it succeeds where Through a Glass Darkly fails, partly because of setting: The glum isolation of the island in the later film puts all our concentration on the actors and the torment their characters inflict on one another. If Through a Glass Darkly is intended to raise questions about faith, about human beings' relationship to a god, it misses the mark. The world the characters of the film inhabit is not a world energized by faith, so their preoccupation with it seems pointless. But the setting of The Seventh Seal is an age of faith -- perhaps the last one our civilization will ever know -- which adds an urgency to the characters' wrangling with it. It became obvious to me on this viewing that the key character is not the knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), but his squire, Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), the sardonic commentator on the events. Jöns is our surrogate, the skeptic with a decidedly modern view of his era's religious extremism, such as the Crusade he and the knight have just been on. What we're witnessing is the merciful escape from a god that for some reason Bergman's modern characters keep hunting: the god of certainty -- the kind of certainty that breeds fanaticism and bigotry. In the end, Bergman's knight sacrifices himself to Death (Bengt Ekerot) so that ordinary people -- the players Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson) and their child -- may live to continue their secular amusements that had earlier been interrupted by fanatics and flagellants. Commentators have sometimes likened the plague that threatens the world of The Seventh Seal to the threat of nuclear annihilation, but I think that misses the point: For the medieval world, the Plague was a test of faith; for the modern world, the Bomb is a test of humanity.  .

Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961)

Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly is usually grouped with his films Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963) as a kind of trilogy about the search for God, though Bergman denied having any intent to make a trilogy. It remains one of his most critically praised films, winning an Oscar for best foreign language film and receiving a nomination for Bergman's screenplay. But there are many, like me, who find it talky and stagy, despite Sven Nykist's beautiful cinematography and the effective use of location shooting on the island of Fårö in the Baltic. Some of the staginess, I think, comes from the casting of such familiar members of Bergman's virtual stock company as Harriet Andersson, Max von Sydow, and Gunnar Björnstrand. Andersson plays Karin, a woman just out of a mental hospital where she has recovered from a recent bout with what seems to be schizophrenia. She is married to Martin (von Sydow) and they have come to stay on the island with her father, David (Björnstrand), and her younger brother, Minus (Lars Passgård). David is distracted by his attempt to finish a novel, and both of his children rather resent his preoccupation. Martin confides in David that although Karin seems to have recovered, the doctors say that her illness is incurable -- a revelation that David records in his diary. Of course, Karin reads the diary, which precipitates a crisis, during which, among other things, she seduces her own brother. At the climax of the film, Karin has a vision of God as a giant spider that attempts to rape her. After she and Martin are taken away to the hospital, David has a moment alone with Minus, whom he assures that God and love are the same thing, and that their love for Karin will help her. Minus seems consoled by this thought, but perhaps even more by the fact that he has actually had a connection with his father: "Papa spoke to me" are the last words of the film. This resolution of the film's torments feels pat and theatrical and even upbeat, which may be why Bergman went on to make the much darker films about religious faith that constitute the rest of the trilogy. But it also suggests to me why I find Bergman's films so much less satisfying than those of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, both of whom wrangled with God and faith in their films. Bresson and Dreyer liked to use unknown actors, and some of the familiarity we have with Bergman's players from other films distances us from the characters. We watch them acting, not being. When Bresson is dealing directly with religious faith in a film like Diary of a Country Priest (1951) or Dreyer is telling a story about a literal resurrection in Ordet (1955), we are forced to confront our own beliefs or absence of them. Bergman simply presents faith as a dramatic problem for his characters to work out, whereas Bresson and Dreyer drag us into the messy actuality of their characters' lives.

The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

The Virgin Spring was probably the first Bergman film I ever saw, and it made a powerful impression that stuck with me for 50-some years. I think that's one reason why I have mixed feelings about it today. In outline, it's a simple tale based on a 13th-century Swedish ballad, in which a young girl on her way to church is raped and murdered, but from the ground where the crime took place, a spring of fresh water erupts miraculously. But watching it today I see a more complex story, full of moral ambiguities. The girl, Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), is not such a paragon as I remembered: She is spoiled and prideful, trying to sleep late and avoid the task of taking the candles to the church. She may not even be as innocent as she is thought to be: The servant, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), who accompanies her says the reason she wants to sleep late is that she was out the previous night flirting with a boy. Karin's mother, Märeta (Birgitta Valberg), is on the one hand a religious fanatic given to self-torture, and on the other an indulgent parent unwilling to discipline her daughter. Karin's father, Töre (Max von Sydow), is divided between the Christian faith he has adopted and a furious desire to wreak revenge on the rapist-murderers. After he has killed the two men and the boy who accompanied them, he expresses remorse but also blames God for his daughter's fate. He vows to build a church on the site, and the spring gushes forth, but as a miracle it seems like a somewhat anticlimactic response to the horror that has gone before. (It's not like the site, where running water is copious, even needs another spring.) Bergman for once is working from a screenplay he didn't write: It's by Ulla Isaksson, which may be why the film is poised so ambiguously between Christian affirmation and Bergman's usual bleak alienation. It is, however, one of Bergman's most beautifully accomplished films, joining him with the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, with whom he had worked only once before (seven years earlier on Sawdust and Tinsel), and with whom he would form one of the great working partnerships in film history. In its evocation of medieval narrative and meticulous re-creation of a milieu (the production designer is P.A. Lundgren), it's superb. But as a film from one of the great modern directors it seems oddly anachronistic and insincere.