So you like Bergman? You like to watch sonorous people sit in a dimly-lit room, talking about the silence of God? OK, I admit: Winter Light is one of my favorite movies. I've watched it as many as ten times. But still, everytime I re-watch it, I think about new things, as new details become the focus of my attention.
The film opens with a church service. This segment is long, but rich in detail. Here, all characters in the story are presented. The pastor, Tomas (excellent, excellent Gunnar Björnstrand), preaches as if he had said all these words too many times before. It is clear that they mean next to nothing to him. The organist coughs and attempts to muster up the energy to finish his business. Most of the church-goers seem bored, or distracted. After the service, Tomas talk to his colleagues. He has to go through with yet another service in the evening, because the other pastor is busy driving his new car. Tomas has caught a cold. He is grumpy but a string of people has unfinished business with him. A fisherman's wife talks about her troubled husband. Tomas' on/off girlfriend Märta, who is a schoolteacher, gets on his nerves with her well-meaning attempts to nurse and take care of him.
This is what happens in the first 30 minutes of the film. The main themes, dis/belief and human frailty, have already been introduced. Winter Light treats its subject matter with care and depth (not without an ounce of irony, of course, this is Bergman). We see the kind of twists and turns in a relationship that we can get a glimpse of talking to somebody for several hours. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story takes place during less than one day. In scene after scene, characters go through minor tribulations, but there are also outbursts of emotion and pangs of honesty. None of this feels contrived. One could perhaps criticize Bergman for writing theatrical lines, but the content of the film still rings true. Bergman hits a spot. Masterfully, the film portrays moments of extreme intimacy and the harsh words uttered in a situation the end of which is impossible to guess. All of these scenes are somehow open-ended, in the sense that they point at a life that the characters will lead afterwards (the film itself ends very abruptly, in a scene full of contradiction and mixed emotion). This open-endedness has, however, nothing to do with vagueness. The reason why Winter Light is so good is that it wrestles with a cluster of questions in a way that strikes me as absolutely serious (yet, not losing a strike of dark comedy out of sight). This is not to say that the film is theoretical or abstract. The opposite is rather the case.
As a film about belief, this is a well-made, non-dogmatic affair. Bergman does not, I think, argue for or against anything. Belief (or the lack of it) is far from an abstractt theory about how the world is. Bergman connects questions about religion and questions about human relations. As Tomas says several times: God is quiet, but his own world is contaminated with human blabber and mundane trifles. Gradually, we see that Tomas' obsession with God's silence is an expression for his lack of commitment to human relations. People bore him. People disgust him. Their physicality repels him. Tomas, like every other (or almost every) character of the film is extremely complicated, and this is what drives the film onwards: the inner conflicts within and between people. Bergman makes nothing to lull us into a conviction that these conflicts can be resolved in a specific way. He wants simply to explore what these conflicts are about.
Aesthetically, the film is a peculiar affair. Sven Nykvist makes the film bath in harsh, merciless daylight. There are almost no shadows. This makes the faces so often placed in the foreground, appear all the more naked. There are no traces of mystery, or forced beauty. Non-diegetic music is thankfully non-existent. The sounds of the film are used very efficiently. In one particularly dramatic (not melodramatic) scene, the only sound we hear is the white noise from streaming water.
Of course, I could go on and on writing about this film. What I want to say last is that Ingrid Thulin makes a harrowing performance as a masochistic/unsure/self-loathing/dependent/strong schoolteacher. Every single second with Thulin in the movie contains so much expression that it is almost hard to watch. The strenght of Thulin's face matches Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc.
Some call this film a symbolic treatment of theological dogmas - other calls it a buster keaton movie made by Bresson. This is a proof of how many dimensions Winter Light has. Yes, it is dark comedy. Yes, it is a film about religion, one of the best, even. And still: it is also one of the boldest portraits of what it means to be unable to love.
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