Wes Anderson | The Grand Budapest Hotel / 2014

the last civilized man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wes Anderson (screenplay and director) The Grand Budapest Hotel / 2014

 

The location of The Grand Budapest Hotel in Wes Anderson’s fantastic new film is not in Budapest, not even in Hungary, and perhaps not even in the former Austria-Hungarian empire, but in on an isolated hill in the fictional country of Zubrowka shortly before World War I. The original of this preposterous vacation spot is based, so I’ve read, on the Grandhotel Pupp in Carlsbad in Czech Republic and the Grandhotel Gellért in Budapest. But, as in most of Anderson’s films, the “reality” of the hotel hardly matters, and he makes clear from the onset that the outside of the hotel, at least, is, as in most of his works, a detailed miniature. The hotel, although lovingly detailed within, is not meant to be a “real” hotel but is simulacrum, an image of a world that no longer exists.   

     Supporting this pretense is a phantasmagoria of outrageous events that help us to comprehend the world of Viennese author Stefan Zweig—on whose works, in part, this film is based—described in his autobiography The World of Yesterday: arriving by train, reports Richard Brody in The New Yorker, where Zweig was forced to use his bag as his seat, the author was suddenly taken aback in Budapest:

 

                              I had gone only a few paces when I had to rub my eyes to make

                              sure that I was not dreaming…. Budapest was as beautiful and

                              carefree as ever before. Women in white dresses walked arm in

                              arm with officers who suddenly appeared to me to be officers of

                              quite a different army than that I had seen only yesterday… I

                              saw how they bought bunches of violets and gallantly tendered

                              them to their ladies, saw spotless automobiles with smoothly

                              shaved and spotlessly dressed gentlemen ride through the streets.

                              And all of this but eight or nine hours away from the front by

                              express train.

      Through his exquisitely purple-uniformed concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and the viewpoint of the immigrant lobby boy Zero Moustafa (the talented newcomer Tony Revolori) Anderson and his cinematographer Robert Yeoman take is into just such an incongruous world. Gustave, a homosexual with heterosexual hankerings after older, blonde women, controls the beautiful Grand Budapest with an iron grip as firm as Kaiser Wilhelm, but his purpose, however, is only to give pleasure to his guests, which, apparently, is why so many of these elderly women return to the hotel again and again. Gustave’s world serves his guests with a subservient alacrity that recognizes their needs even before they themselves do. Grand rooms, beautifully mosaicked spas, and magnificent corridors speak not only of the Belle Époque, but of a world outside of time and space. Indeed, one morning, when the nearly clueless lobby boy picks up the daily newspapers for the hotel discovers a headline that sends him racing back to Gustave, it is not in horror of the major newspaper banner—that the borders are soon to be closed—but that one of Gustave’s wealthy conquests, Madame D (Tilda Swinton), has just died.

       In seconds Zero and Gustave are traveling by train to Madame D’s estate. Stopped at the border, where the brutal soldiers find Zero’s papers to be insufficient, Gustave courageously steps up, in witty repartee, to protect the boy, for which both he and Zero suffer painful facial slams by the soldiers’ rifle butts. An Austrian Inspector, Henckels (Edward Norton), who often stayed at The Grand Budapest as a child, steps in to save the travelers.

      Reaching the Desgotte-und-Taxis mansion, the two encounter a funeral already underway, followed by a reading of the will—officiated by the family lawyer, Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum)—which apparently leaves the family’s greatest work of art, Boy with Apple, to Gustave. And at that moment we meet the true villains of this maniacal work, Madame D’s son Dimitri (Adrien Brody), his murderous right-hand-man J. G. Jopling (William Dafoe), and the deceased’s hideous trio of badly lip-stick painted sisters. They also meet, momentarily, the mansion’s chef, Serge X (Mathieu Amalric) who, it turns out, was witness to what is now being described as a murder! Given Dimitri’s verbal outrage over the gift of the painting to Gustave, he and Zero determine to steal the valuable art work, but almost before they can stuff it away safely into the Grand Budapest safe, Gustave is arrested for Madame D’s murder and imprisoned in the formidable Zubrowka fortress compound.

       So begins a series of roller-coaster-like adventures, including a hilarious escape that combines elements of Jacques Becker’s great prison drama The Tunnel, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, and even Chaplin’s Modern Times. Horrific murders and madcap events are heaped one upon the other, as Anderson incorporates enough cameo roles (with regulars such as Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Tom Wilkinson, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, and Jason Schwartzman) to fill an epic. And in some senses, The Grand Budapest Hotel almost becomes an epic itself, playing out so many capers that after a while its audience grows a bit weary, if not utterly confused.

       Fortunately, the marvelous Zero has discovered love in the beautifully innocent and birthmarked pastry chef, Agatha (Saorise Ronan), who several times saves the day with her Mendl’s cakes and her own bravery in attempting to retrieve the painting from the Grand Budapest safe. Her reward, so the elderly Zero (F. Murray Abraham) sadly tells the “author,” is death from a disease from which today she might easily have been saved. And with that we know also that everything that Gustave and his grand hotel has stood for was destroyed, “stomped out,” one might put it, in the First World War. Its later reincarnation, in which most of the tale is told, is a world of shabby ox-blood and yellow colored furniture which tackily reveals the institutions’ decay.

       Finally perceived by the courts as the heir of all of Madame D’s estate, Gustave, again travelling with Zero, is once more stopped at the border. But this time Gustave’s urbane bravery does not succeed. The man whom Zero describes as “one of the last civilized men,” is taken out and shot.

      Now, worth millions, Gustave’s inheritor, Zero, is gradually forced to sell off his vast holdings in order, for sentiment’s sake and the memory of his beloved Agatha, to keep the decaying hotel he regularly visits, living in the small servant’s quarter bedroom where he once lived as a Lobby Boy. 

     Zweig’s beautiful fictions, as well as the works of Proust and others of the period, is all we have left of the grand age of such civilized behavior and beauty. The barbarity of the 20th century destroyed everything that Zweig loved, and in 1942, during the early years of World War II, he and his wife despairingly committed suicide in Brazil to where they had escaped. Even if we might question whether that fabled period was so “civilized” as it presented itself, we have to recognize it as a legendary era whose ideals are no longer possible to maintain. Ladies in lace white dresses and mustachioed and well-groomed men who loquaciously offered up heaps of violets and lilacs no longer exist—nor, perhaps, might we desire them to.

      Gustave is described by Zero has a man who, perhaps, never lived in his own time; the same might be said, of course, for Zweig, Proust, Joseph Roth, and so many others who lived to see their grand visions of civilization crumble in the new century, with whole generations of communities throughout Europe wiped off the face of the planet.

      There are those who find Anderson’s highly stylized fables as whimsical fantasies without substance. NPR’s Ian Buckwaiter, for example, described The Grand Budapest Hotel as “a culmination of the tinkly music-box aesthetic of Anderson’s work to date, turned up to 11.” I, however, prefer to think of this director’s films, of which the newest is one of the very best, as testaments to the romantic imagination, too few of which exist in our cynical time of denial. Either we can wonder about the vast power of the human imagination or wink at it. I prefer to do the former—but along with Anderson, maybe with just a little wan smile.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2014).

Bill Condon | Kinsey / 2004

getting to know you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Condon (screenwriter and director) Kinsey / 2004

 

According to the Kinsey Report

Ev’ry average man you know

Much prefers to play his favorite sport

When the temperature is low,

But when the thermometer goes ‘way up

And the weather is sizzling hot,

Mister Adam

For his madam.

Is not,

 

‘Cause it’s too, too

Too darn hot,

It’s too darn hot,

It’s too darn hot.

 

 —Cole Porter  

  If there was ever a man who burrowed “under the skin,” so to speak, of American culture, it was Alfred Kinsey; Kinsey, indeed, went straight to the heart—if brain and sexual organs properly account for that metaphoric center of being—and in the process terrified the U.S. society of the 1950s. William Condon’s 2004 bio-cinema nicely outlines Kinsey’s career and points up his effects on American’s sexual understanding and, ultimately, the sexual politics of our time.

     As early as the 1930s Kinsey became interested in the different forms of sexual practices. The movie dates that interest, in fact, back to his 1921 marriage to Clara Bracken McMillen (Mac), when the couple discovered that given the size of Kinsey’s penis and the thickness of Mac’s hymen, sex was just too painful. They consulted a doctor who quickly resolved their difficulties. But soon after, when students begin approaching the biologist about questions they had concerning sex, Kinsey—who up until that time had devoted his life to collecting and cataloguing gall wasps—was appalled at their lack of knowledge and the nonexistence of any intelligent studies on the issue.

     In 1935 Kinsey (Liam Neeson in the film) delivered a lecture to a faculty discussion group at his Indiana University, attacking “the widespread ignorance of sexual structure and physiology,” perhaps the first such public discussion of the issues. Soon after, he began teaching a course on sexuality (a topic discussed previously only in anatomy classes) to graduate students and married and engaged undergraduates.

     The frankness and thoroughness of these lectures predictably scandalized many of the university supporters and faculty members, a hostility which would eventually work against Kinsey’s research. One of the unsung heroes of the movie—and in real life the force behind Indiana’s phenomenal progressiveness not just in the sciences, but in music, art, literature and athletics—was the newly appointed (1937) University President Herman Wells, whose ability to obtain university support for what was to become the Kinsey Institute was something close to a miracle given the political context of the times.

     Kinsey’s experience with the diversity of the gall wasp population, determined by his accumulation and cataloging of a large cross-section of the species, predicted his methodology for his human sexual studies, which is probably what led to his funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, and ultimately, was his undoing.

     The film, unfortunately, too easily connects his interest in this subject by presenting Kinsey’s religiously involved father’s, Alfred Kinsey’s conservative childhood as a sort of case study on his psychological makeup. There can be no doubt that being born into a devoutly religious family—wherein the father was an imperious patriarch who demanded his children have no contact with the other sex and who outlawed any sexual behavior, including masturbation—greatly affected Kinsey. But one should remember that such restrictions were placed in varying degrees upon many thousands of young men and women of the day, myself included, who—although they later rebelled against those limitations and the perceptions behind them—did not go on to liberate American sexuality.

       Of greater interest is the open-mindedness of Kinsey’s wife (brilliantly played in the movie by Laura Linney), without whose support and sexual openness it would be hard to imagine her husband’s achievements. One of the most touching moments in the movie, in fact, occurs upon Kinsey’s admission of having sex with his young assistant, Clyde Martin, which, despite her free-thinking, Mac finds difficult to understand or accept. In the film you can almost see the pain she suffers—not entirely because of her own sense of betrayal by her husband’s sexual infidelity. She seems nearly as troubled by her inability to embrace this societally “banned” behavior. Linney’s face projects not just the fears of a woman losing her connubial relationship, but of a woman unable to intellectually accept a fairly common behavioral pattern on such a personal level. As Clyde Martin says later in the film: “Sex is a risky game, because if you’re not careful, it will cut you wide open.”

     In 1948 Kinsey published his earth-shattering study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, based on his thousands of interviews with males collated in what would later be seen as controversial questionnaires. The findings of this study can be boiled down to several simple observations that seem almost obvious given most of our current attitudes toward sex: “diversity is life’s irreducible fact” and “the human being is capable of all sorts of love.” Given the context of the time, however, represented in the film by statements made by fellow faculty member Thurman Rice—“The idea that man needs sex is a lie”; “Men don’t reach their sexual peak until the age of 40.”—one understands how radical Kinsey’s findings were. The film also presents a poignant scene that is far more emotionally grounded for me than the potential violence against gays presented in the more recent Brokeback Mountain. Interviewed by the scientist, a young gay man reveals that having discovered he was gay, family members literally branded him and his friend on the chest and back, the friend dying in the process. His assessment of his own sexuality is powerfully expressed in utter simplicity: “It’s not that I mind being gay. I just wish people weren’t so put out by it.”  

      Kinsey, however, went further than simply observing the variant sexual behaviors of his interviewees. He planned a future volume on sexual perversions and argued from the start that if a sexual pattern existed on such a large scale as his studies suggested that it could hardly be labeled a crime: “Everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin, and everybody’s crime is no crime at all.” It was this argument that weighed heavily in the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. Its implications, however, go much further and include issues such as incest and pedophilia. The movie attempts to make it clear that Kinsey never condoned sexual abuse of any kind, yet it also suggests that he was far more embracing of sexual behavior than our current society might accept. His views of the hysteria surrounding pedophilia and other criminal sex acts could apply equally to our current attitudes toward what we see as “sexual aberrations.”

     It was one thing to present the country with a detailed report on male sexual habits. Interviewing women and reporting their sexual actions was too much. Kinsey’s discoveries—that not only were females as capable of sexual response as men, but that half of the women he interviewed had engaged in premarital coitus and one-quarter in extramarital sex, and 62% of his female interviewees had engaged in masturbation while 13% reported to have had at least one same-sex orgasmic experience by the age of 45—were facts simply too shocking for the male-centered, sexist authorities of the day. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, angry over Kinsey’s refusals to supply him with information about homosexuals he’d interviewed (hilariously funny in the context of what we today know about Hoover’s own homosexuality), had Kinsey put under surveillance; imports of pornography ordered for research by the Kinsey Institute were seized; and the Red-suspecting Reece committee—looking into Communist-supported foundations—argued that Kinsey’s books were designed to destroy American morals, allowing for a Communist takeover. The Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its support, and when Indiana University President Wells attempted to obtain monies from the university, trustees voted against him. In 1956, two years after his loss of funding, Kinsey died.

      The film stops short of his death, presenting instead two important images of the scientist, one suggesting the long-lasting love between him and his wife, and the other revealing—despite his feelings of failure—the enormous effects of his research. Speaking of the difficulties she encountered upon discovering her feelings of love for a woman fellow-worker, an interviewee (in a cameo role by Lynn Redgrave) admits her own depression, alcoholism, and ostracism by her husband and children. Kinsey’s rejoinder “That just goes to show how little things have changed,” is met with her absolute denial: “No! After I read your book I realized how many other women were in the same situation. I mustered the courage to talk to my friend and she told me, to my surprise, that the feelings were mutual.” Now in a relationship with that woman, the interviewee testifies to what we all know is the truth: “Things have gotten much better.”

      However, there is still a great fear, I must admit, in the back of my mind—as well as millions of others who recognize Kinsey as an important liberating force of American sexuality—that things may not have changed as much as we’d like. The continued virulent attacks by religious fundamentalists on all matters sexual—but particularly on homosexuality and other minority sexual acts—must be recognized. On the internet I quickly found a posting by a group called Concerned Women for America, touting, once again, the accusations of critics such as Judith A. Reisman—who argued that Kinsey’s staff sexually abused children—and accusing the film of “celebrating the sexual researcher’s ‘liberating’ ideas” and encouraging “the Kinsey sex cult” of promoting “free sex, regardless of the human cost.” The group suggests an alternative of “education, prayer and action” to “turn harmful laws and teachings around to protect, rather than harm, the American family.” It’s strange to read this last statement, for except for prayer (an action the film portrays Kinsey undertaking as a young man to fight his desires to masturbate) I presume that Kinsey might have agreed: it’s simply a matter, I guess, of which way you want to turn things, toward the light of truth or the darkness of denial. But then the definition of “truth” and “denial” are equally slippery concepts. As Kinsey says: “Love is the answer, isn’t it? But sex raises a lot of very interesting questions….”

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2005

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2005).

Mathias Broe | Ung mands dans (Young Man's Dance) / 2014

the last dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mathias Broe (screenwriter and director) Ung mands dans (Young Man's Dance) / 2014 [12 minutes]

Mattis (Lior Cohen) is a competition ballroom dancer, and evidently an award-winning boy. As he combs and dries his hair in preparation for the evening’s major contribution, his father enters the bathroom to wash up his hands. When his son asks him if might attend that night’s events, there is no answer as the father leaves the room; apparently he is not happy with Mattis’ involvement with dance.

     There may also be other reasons, we soon discover, why the boy’s father is so opposed to the entire affair. We almost immediately discover that the very handsome young man, of age 17 or 18, is in a sexual relationship with his dancing teacher. How long the affair has been going on, how it started, how involved to the two are, and how it began are all subjects we will never learn in this short film—somewhat to its detriment.

     We do not even learn what has brought the two of them, man and boy to the situation that the movie focuses on. In fact, after a brief encounter between the two, teacher and student just before the dance events, we only sense their involvement, Mattis almost melting to the touch the teacher’s hand as he checks out a mark on his neck. A hickey, we wonder, from a previous moment together?

    But the man quickly pulls away and leaves, as the movie pretends its real focus is on the dance events themselves as in films such as Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (1992).

    It almost immediately becomes clear, however, that despite the pretty scene in which we now are witness to with Mattis and his partner moving in the flowing rhythms of a waltz, Danish director Mathias Broe is not truly interested in their ballroom maneuvers.

    The real dance of this film, more like a dans apache, takes place long after the lights have gone out on the dancefloor, and the true competition begins with the beautiful boy, now half naked, confronting his teacher at his car parked alone in a nearby lot.

     For some reason, the teacher (Niels Bender) has come somewhat to his senses and is attempting to break away from the relationship, but Mattis is not about to let him go, and plays out a wild dramatic scene of seduction, self-abuse, and finally almost saddo-masochist behavior as, refusing to leave the man’s car as ordered to time and again, he becomes determined to maintain control over the elder as the recipient of his love.

    The IMDb and other blurbs for this film suggest that Mattis has turned to his teacher because of his father’s rejection. But that seems far too simplistic of a Freudian argument, which furthermore I feel is no longer a valid analysis of the psychological needs of this young kid. I would argue from the little context that we are provided, that although he seems truly to be seeking gay love and sex perhaps not easily available elsewhere to a young man in his position, the real issue here is power. Who is control of this societally “perverse” love, the man or the child? Surely the man’s guilt over what was probably at first been his sexual advances has led him to now pull away; but Mattis, who has apparently been more than receptive to those approaches, is not about to give him up as a lover. Indeed, he is almost smug in sense of entitlement and, more importantly, in is belief that his youth and beauty will surely win out over any self-control the danselærer is now attempting to maintain.

     And the visual dance between them as they sit in the front seat of the teacher’s car is the true focus of this cinematic work. The worried looks of fear and torture that crosses the elder’s face as he announces that he taking the boy home, and the challenge of Mattis’ denial that he won’t go there is played out in a sudden torrent of rain in a swirl of yellow, red, and blue lights that we feel we have suddenly entered a musical sound stage. When Mattis puts his hand on the teacher’s knee, he pushes it away and slaps his face, drawing blood.

     Mattis’ response is truly masochistic, demanding that the man “hit him,” again, the teacher finally so furious with the out-of-hand situation that he puts his hands around the boy’s neck as if to choke him, which just as quickly becomes a kind of sexual lap-dance, the man moving his hand to the boy’s chin as his body thrusts in the rhythm of the fuck. A moment later they both sit facing forward, the light having changed to yellows and greens that hint at an after-coitus moment of rest.

     Finally, the man pulls over, insisting that it isn’t working out anymore. “You are not well; none of us are,” he argues as if trying to shift the blame upon the younger man, although given the boy’s maniacal behavior, he surely has a point.      

     Mattis only moves over to top him and bends toward a kiss, the other finally getting out of the car and pulling the boy out the other side. He tries to drive off, but even then Mattis keys the car as it attempts to pull away, drawing perhaps his nails across the surface of the auto, the man stops, jumps from the car and wrestles the boy violently to the ground in a manner that as observers we truly do feel worried for the boy’s survival.

   He finally lets up, both standing, the teacher facing the camera as the boy slowly wanders off, apparently having just performed his last dance.

    Given the scene we witness, we can neither entirely blame the man as pedophile, or exempt the young man as a victim in this struggle of release from and desperate attempt to hold on to love—however that word might be defined. And I should point out, the in Denmark, the locations of these events, the boy is of legal age.

      When I first saw this film, I felt it was far too fragmented and incomplete view of the situation to provide much of significance; but watching this over several times, I now realize just how evocative it is in providing us an insight into some aspects of man-boy relationships that usually are overlooked or purposely ignored in the hysteria of societal outrage. Along with French director Jean-François Monette’s Take-out (2000), Australian Jonathan Wald’s What Grown-Ups Know (2004), and fellow-Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s Awakening (2008), this film and several others should force us to rethink such relationships, with an attempt to better comprehend both sides of the equation.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).  

Ingmar Bergman | Persona / 1966

whatever happened to elisabet vogler?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenwriter and director) Persona / 1966

 

 In Ingmar Bergman’s profoundly beautiful film, Persona, a great theater actor Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suddenly falls mute in a production of Electra and cannot continue the performance. Even though she is found to have no physical—or, we are told, mental disabilities (I’ll return to this later)—she remains silent, refusing to speak and is institutionalized. The head of the institution (Margaretha Krook) apparently believes it is just a temporary break-down of sorts, a psychological refusal of identity, and assigns a cheerful young nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), to the actress, the nurse even admitting to her own inexperience, particularly in relationship to this well-seasoned woman of “masks” (the original meaning of persona). In short, Alma (the soul) is now linked up with an interchange with a willful being, a woman of mind. The situation grows far more intense as the two, patient and nurse, retreat to a beach home loaned to them by the head of the clinic.

     If, at first, this encounter between the two seems fairly pleasant and uneventful, with the thoughtful Elisabet quietly listening to the chattering woman who reveals her youthful and rather conventional values, we sense, even early on, a tension between the two. The younger magpie is herself embarrassed by her chatter, but with the elder’s seeming encouragement (a presumption, surely, since she says absolutely nothing, refusing to respond to Alma’s questions), Alma—who, as a nurse, has clearly generally performed the role of the patient listener—begins to open up and free herself from secrets she has held even from herself.

     At first these seem only to involve a few criticisms from her boyfriend, Karl-Henrik, who accuses her of lack of ambition. Although she’s a bit unsure of what he means, we cannot help but perceive, in her desire to serve both her career like the elderly retired nurses who live on site and her future husband, that she clearly has no deep aspirations. It’s only gradually, particularly in her long recounting of a sexual incident with another woman and two adolescent boys who have strayed from home to watch the women bathing in the nude upon the beach, that we begin to perceive that she is perhaps a far more complex being. She reveals that the sexual incident was the most fulfilling sexual encounter that she has ever had, and that the foursome with the two young boys resulted in her becoming pregnant, ending in an abortion, performed by a friend of Karl-Hendrik’s. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time, she regrets both her lying to her fiancée and the fact of the abortion.

      Other similar revelations Alma makes to the silent actress, revelations of the soul to its brain, provide her with a sense of great freedom, a release of sorts which often happens when the mind truly does listen to the heart. And a love between the two develops, the two women acting out the relationship with images that suggest a kind of lesbian love, but more truly presents the fulfillment of a fully functioning emotional whole. Many critics have attempted to argue that most of the somewhat confusing interchanges of the film must be perceived as a long dream of Alma’s. But that seems to me to demand a kind of narrative logic for a film that weaves its “reality,” however we define that, with psychologically-conceived dream-like encounters. And the mind portrayed in this great work of art is not truly normal.

     First of all, no matter how normal the mind appears to be, the soul can never be fulfilled by its sometimes-cruel analysis and pretense. If the soul is totally honest, the mind is forever evaluating and judging what it perceives. After writing a letter to the doctor, which Elisabet forgets (perhaps purposefully) to seal, Alma cannot resist opening it on her way to the post, finding that the actress is “studying” her as if she might be the subject for a latter enactment of life.

      Terribly hurt and feeling betrayed, Alma returns, determined to act out her anger, at first leaving a piece of broken glass on the back patio upon which Elisabet steps, immediately recognizing that the “accident” has been intended. A violent encounter between the two ensues, which the director reiterates in the process of the film itself by suggesting a break in the reel, a spooling out of the cinema tape—symbolizing, obviously, the breakdown of its two human “actors,” with Alma insisting that the real horror is that Elisabet is just pretending to be normal, while underneath she is truly cruel and mad.  Suddenly we must return to the original problem: what did happen to Elisabet Vogler? Why have the interrelationships between her verbal skills and her internal perceptions suddenly become severed?

     Bergman, the director, proffers all the usual explanations: she has been traumatized by past history, represented by a photograph of a young boy and his family being arrested by the Nazis in World War II; she is suffering from the shock of the new inhumane treatments of humans in the Viet Nam War, which is symbolized by the self-immolation of a Buddhist Monk on her television set; she has become disgusted by her “acting” out of life as opposed to actually living and experiencing it.

    Given her own guilt over having successfully “erased” her own would-be child, Alma projects a scenario (played out in the script twice, the first with the camera tracing the reactions of the accused, the second focusing on the accuser) that argues Elisabet, told by a friend that she was missing the qualities of a good mother, determines to become pregnant, only to be immediately terrified by everything that comes with it: the changes of the body, the fear of pain, and the possibilities of death, not to say anything about how it might change her independently active life. In Alma’s telling, Elisabet grows to hate her son even before he is born and turns the new baby over to her husband and nanny for its upbringing. Much as in Bergman’s later film, Autumn Sonata, the lonely child only grows to love and idealize his mother further in her absence, the fact of which only further fuels Elisabet’s hate. For Alma, the final self-imposed silence is an attempt to block out all those who might love and wish to communicate with the great diva.

      This scenario leads to a quite obvious dream sequence, wherein Elisabet’s husband, Vogler, visits the seaside cottage, mistaking Alma for his wife, and pleading with her to return and help fill the emptiness of the two, father and son, and demanding she have sex with him. Alma goes along with the ruse seemingly unable to recognize that she has, in fact, become one with Elisabet—who now suddenly packs up and disappears, presumably to return to her family; while, after cleaning up and airing all beds and sheets, Elisabet also leaves to face, we can presume, a very different life from the one she had imagined.

      The intelligent viewer recognizes, perhaps, that the young nurse who imagined herself as able to “become” Elisabeth, is perhaps a version of Elisabet’s earlier self, and that their encounter in a time out of time, has allowed the tortured actress to restore some of her own past.

       If we never discover precisely what actually happened to Elisabet Vogler, we can certainly imagine it through Bergman’s complex depiction of the slings and arrows, large and small, that gradually destroy the heart, that lead to the hateful revenge of an Electra who can no longer abide the beating of the human heart. Whatever happened to Elisabet Vogler, we can hope has finally been resolved by the film’s last frame, which takes the finally unburdened soul into its future possibilities.

 

Los Angles, September 21, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2015).