TRILOGY SEASON
Ingmar Bergman's Faith Trilogy
Karin ( Harriet Anderson ) has returned home after treatment for her schizophrenia. There is no cure longer term, and like her Mother before her she will eventually be consumed by it. But for now she has short lived interludes when her life seems lucid and normal. Her Father ( Gunmar Bjornstrand ) feels guilty that he has let his ambitions as a writer always put his family in second place. The novel he's writing conveniently means he has to absent himself from home in order to finish it. Writing has become a form of escape from a troubled relationship within his personal life
Though Karin's Husband ( Max Von Sydow ) is a doctor, he feels helpless in the face of his wife's illness. Though he loves her, he is unable to express that through close physical intimacy. Karin's brother is too young really to handle what is happening to his sister. No one else,however, is available to explain or understand his sexual feelings and desires.
For a while Karin has been going to the abandoned loft in the house. Here she hears voices in the walls, and imagines God will come to her from out of the cupboard. Her faith appears to be both a solace and a torment to her, The voices start to tell her to do forbidden things, like read her father's diary. There she discovers her illness is incurable and that her Father ghoulishly wants to document her decline in writing. This disturbs the frail balance of her mental state and during this upset the voices tell her to seduce her brother.
Filmed in the Orkneys on Faro, Through A Glass Darkly is set on a sparse island largely cut off from the outside world. Karin's mental illness is an inherited one. This separates her from her Father and her husband, both of whom retreat into their artistic and scientific realms. To place faith in them, as ways to make sense of their lives and reality. Which, in both cases, have significantly failed them.
God is never part of their worldview. Because of his sister's illness her brother is basically sidelined from his Father's thoughts, love and appreciation. Psychologically, emotionally and spiritually they are all alienated from each other. Nothing they do can provide the sustenance, nor take the place, of the God most of them no longer believe in. Even God in the end disappoints Karin because when he does appear to her, it turns out to be a spider. God becoming another source for her fearfulness and feelings of emptiness.
Whether it is merely a technical limitation or entirely intentional, the sound quality in the movie has a very pronounced bouncing echo. It is mostly noticeable when characters walk around the house. The house feels empty of life, even uninhabited. Its very minimally furnished, containing only the barest of necessities. This is not a home, it displays little sign of warmth, of being constantly lived in and loved. Spatially the echo is suggestive of an atmosphere of an unbalanced state of mind. One where the past reverberates in the air, distorting the stability of the present.
Through A Glass Darkly brought Bergman his second Oscar for best foreign language film. His first being the previous year for Virgin Spring. The script is extremely well written, sensitively filmed and well acted by some of Bergman's company regulars. And given the bleakness of the subject matter is devoid of histrionics. Excellent.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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