Thursday, April 18, 2024

Alf Sjöberg | Hets (Torment) / 1944

tormenting desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenplay), Alf Sjöberg (director) Hets (Torment) / 1944

 

Alf Sjöberg’s memorable movie, Torment, begins with an incident wherein a young boy arrives late for school, missing early morning prayers. As he enters the towering staircases, trying to  escape detection, he is watched over by a teacher who, when the boy tries to escape into a classroom, follows him. Together the two play what almost might be described as a kind of hide-and-seek as the determined elder hunts down his smaller prey, evidently so that he can identify and punish him. In this slightly perverted game, we recognize the terror of the tardy child, who does everything he can to maneuver himself out of harm’s way.


      In the very next scene, we see that things are not much different for the seniors of this school, particularly in the classroom of their Latin teacher, who they have nicknamed, with good reason, “Caligula” (Stig Järrel), who torments them during their attempts to translate Latin passages into Swedish, threatening and demeaning them upon even slight infractions, and demanding immediate rote memory of Latin endings. Like the teacher in the first scene, Caligula seems to delight in their petty errors and his gratified by serious failures, awarding demerits.   
   
Although all these young men are terrorized by and hate him, one handsome student, Jan-Erik Widgren (Alf Kjellin) is clearly Caligula’s favorite target, continually putting the diligent Jan-Erik to the test, and threatening him, pointing stick in hand, for even the most minor of mistranslations and for his use even of the Swedish language.


     Although neither the director nor the screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, openly suggest any sexual reasons behind Caligula’s torture of the boy, it is apparent that, as in the film’s first scene, there is something perverse in the teacher’s obvious focus on Jan-Erik, certainly the best-looking boy in the classroom; if his behavior isn’t a manifestation of a sublimated sexual attraction, it is, nonetheless, possible that the ugly older man is envious of young charge, and determined, for that very reason, to do him in.

      Throughout the film, moreover, Caligula admits to others and the headmaster that he has recently been “sick,” implying that his intolerance of his students has something to do with a recent illness from which he has apparently not yet completely recovered. He never makes clear what this illness might have been, but surely it must have a relationship to his treatment of Jan-Erik

      When, soon after, we discover that the sleazy teacher also has his eye on a young worker in the local tobacconist shop, Bertha, we perceive that this “sickness” is even deeper that we might have imagined. If he, at least, pushes Jan-Erik away from him or, more simply, wishes to control him, his attempts to woe Bertha are far more nefarious and disgusting.

       Caligula, we soon discover, has been following and, possibly, threatening Bertha for some time, leading her to drink. When Jan-Erik, after a night out with his classmate, discovers her  stumbling down a staircase, utterly drunk, he kindly attempts to help her, discovering her address, and leading her to her home.


     Terrified that her mysterious stalker will try to enter her apartment—even though she has changed the lock on her door—she begs her underage savior to stay with her, not only depriving him of his needed study time, but ultimately seducing him—in an act that today we would brand as child-abuse—into her bed.

     At least her “abuse” is of the pleasant kind, and this young Werther—Jan-Erik imagines falling in love with one woman for whom he will play his violin—quickly falls madly in love with her, abandoning his studies to be in her presence.

      If Caligula has long stalked her, with Jan-Erik’s interest in Bertha he becomes even more compelled to torment the woman—and, in his own version of child-abuse—his young male charge.

     One night Jan-Erik arrives to find his lover dead, with Caligula hiding in her clothes closet. Many have compared the scene which reveals Jan-Erik’s discovery of the presumed murderer as resembling scenes from Murnau’s Nosferatu, but I think the images more closely resemble the depiction of another child-murderer, Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert, in Fritz Lang’s M. Like Beckert, Caligula seems to know no sexual bounds in his destruction of the young and beautiful.


     Although Jan-Erik calls the police, accusing Caligula as having murdered Bertha, like all the adult beings in this film, the police dismiss the boy’s assertions, finding that Bertha died of a heart attack, freeing Caligula to not only slap Jan-Erik in front of the far gentler headmaster (Olof Winnerstrand) but to demand the boy’s expulsion.

     The original film ended darkly, with Jan-Erik attending Bertha’s funeral, expelled from school, while his peers celebrate their graduation.


     Given the public criticisms of this first version, Sjöberg and Bergman added a final scene wherein, after all the other students have graduated, the headmaster visits Jan-Erik, now inhabiting Bertha’s old apartment, telling him that he will help him to get back on track and find a new life.

     Caligula arrives to seek forgiveness for his behavior, but his former student turns from him, walking into the light, now free from all the “educational” abuse that even the family doctor has described as something closer to living in a concentration camp (a theme which is underscored by a scene showing Caligula reading Dagposten, the Swedish Nazi newspaper).

     Many critics have proclaimed that the teacher called “Caligula” represents the increasing fascist elements taking over in Europe, and there is quite obviously enough in this film to give their viewpoint credence. As commentator Tom Brayton suggests in his on-line review in Alternate Ending:

     

“The film is part of the long, glorious tradition of movies similar, but worse than, Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece Zero for Conduct. At a school in Stockholm, several boys nearing the end of their secondary school careers are suffering under the tyrannic rule of a Latin teacher they have taken to referring as "Caligula" (Stig Järrel). He treats his classroom like a kingdom - or more to the point, a dictatorship. Given the first draft's 1942 composition date, and the 1944 release date, it hardly seems reasonable to doubt that we have, in front of us, a metaphor for the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, though I do not know that either Sjöberg or Bergman ever claimed as much. Still, given Sweden's very particular situation during the Second World War - officially neutral but geographically close enough to Germany that it somewhat nervously acceded to German influence - and Bergman's own youthful fascination with Hitler's charisma, before the developments of the late '30s shocked that out of him, it is exceedingly hard not to see this as a story about contemporary politics, and not just a coming-of-age story about a student finding it in himself to resist a single teacher's casual brutality.”

 

      Yet even more commentators have continued to puzzle over the reasons for the professor’s behavior to his fellow students, some hinting that the lack of motivation weakens the film, and turns it into a mere melodrama. Obviously, Caligula is a kind of sadist, but so common, as the writer of The Film Sufi review argues, not to even be taken too seriously. This reviewer even dismisses the political interpretations, arguing that it is simply an exaggerated vision of the student, Jan-Erik, himself:

 

“But I think such interpretations offer an overly externalized picture.  I see the film as primarily an internalized nightmare on the part of the young protagonist, Jan-Erik.  When you are young and impressionable like Jan-Erik, the world seems to have an overabundance of threatening characters like Caligula. Actually, the Caligula character, while objectionable, is not all that unusual – you have probably run into many instances of people of his type. These people are troublesome, but they are usually not monstrous ogres, and anyway there are just too many of them. Here, it is true that Caligula’s insidious hectoring of the alcoholic and vulnerable Bertha contributed to her heart attack, but, regrettably, there are many such people, and we do not have grounds for having them all arrested. We have to deal with them in a civil way and carry on with our higher pursuits.  This is what Jan-Erik has to do at the end of the film. So, yes, Torment is essentially a mood-piece about the traumas of youth.”

 

     Strangely, this argument seems to only concur with most of the adults of this film, who do not even take Bertha’s death seriously, and certainly couldn’t be bothered by the horrified reports of what they see merely as merely an overwrought youth. In this case the critic appears to be siding with the villains of the piece, the society which looks the other way when it encounters a system—in this case the state of education in the day—which, again as the good doctor has observed (as summarized by the Film Sufi commentator) “overworks the students with pedantic, narrow, and meaningless exercise of no good purpose.”

      I would argue that all we need do is return to Caligula’s own assessment of himself: he has been sick, he insists. That sickness fits the pattern of a closeted gay man’s recognition of his own attraction to men, or in this case, young boys. It seems quite apparent to me that, as I hint above, it is his own attraction to Jan-Erik that forces him to keep at the greatest distance that keep’s the boy by constantly enforcing various punishments to maintain a hostile relationship and at arm’s length. The metaphor of the teacher on the chase has already been established in the very first scene of this film, and Caligula is careful that he might not fall into that pattern.

      A common resolution to such feelings in closeted men is to search out a woman who might be attracted or needy enough to involve herself in a sexual relationship with the individual, thus proving to himself that he is a heterosexual at heart. Caligula has seemed to find such a figure in the alcoholic shop clerk Bertha. And despite her abhorrence and fear of him, he literally stalks her as a solution to his increasing attraction to his student.

      Inevitably, when he discovers that his student and his would-be heterosexual solution have joined up in their own sexual relationship, his entire world collapses; he has lost both his originally sublimated lover and its mediating alternative. Such a diseased mind, a self-hating homophobe in love with a boy, now has only the choice of destroying both if he can. In this case, it is the professor who is the tormented beast, who, in turn, torments the others around him as a palliative to his own sickened condition.

       The tacked on last scene, accordingly, is not at all in accordance with the rest of the film, and actually weakens the original horror story which is not that different from many a later psychological nightmare Bergman would create.

       For that last scene, Sjöberg was absent, having other commitments, enabling the young Bergman—the man who would eventually rise to take over Sjöberg’s position as the most noted of Swedish directors—to direct his very first scene.

      Yet this picture is still very much Sjöberg’s film, with its intense use of deep blacks and luminescent whites, along with the director’s fascination with winding and treacherous staircases—clearly representing the terrifying paths these young students have daily to undertake in order to become adults—and the many mirrored images which the children (and audience) perceive but seemingly have little effect on the frozen-minded and visually blind adults, who like vampires, cannot see themselves for who they truly are in the mirrors images.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).

 

No comments:

Post a Comment

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...