I’ve alluded to my burgeoning passion for old movies here before, and yestereven I watched Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly. This film is the first of his trilogy on Man’s relation to God, his need to know, and the idea of God as a negative presence.
Bergman is semi-famous for exploring such questions in a very minimal style by reducing everything to its essentials. This film is promethean in that regard (even more so than The Seventh Seal). It is a prime example of a stark essentialism that puts the dialogue and tacit meaning in the center. There are no gimicks here, no showy effects or overplayed scores (the entire soundtrack is a piece by Bach, a foghorn, and the cawing of gulls). The entire movie consists of four people on an island.
We concentrate on Karin, a woman just released from the psychology ward of a local hospital, with a relatively “incurable” psychosis. The film, which takes place over a twenty-four hour period, starts with her in a good period, and then we watch her state degrade as the others look on, we presume, helplessly (I’m not sure they are as helpless as they’re made out to be, I think they’re all just caught up in their own problems).
Karin is apparently in communication with invisible others, who are telling her what she must do in order to join them in welcoming and looking upon God. We watch her learn that her father has a callous desire to document her irreversible spiral into complete madness, so that he might record some semblance of truth in a novel and win the critical acclaim so dear to his heart. We watch her flirt with her sexually confused and frustrated brother, Minus. We watch her spurn the advances of her husband Martin, because she feels she must leave him behind to be with God.
Finally we see her “breakdown” in a tumultuous cacophony as the relative silence of the film is shattered by the thumping roar of an ambulance helicopter, which jars open the closet door from which God is scheduled to emerge. There is absolute terror and revulsion in Karin at this longed for event and after Martin administers a sedative she describes the events through her eyes, subsequent to which she dons sunglasses to block out the light (a typical symbol of divinity).
In all of this I felt most for Minus. Adolescence is a trying time for a young man, and I feel that Bergman did an admirable job of overemphasizing it, without losing perspective. There are strong hints in the film that Minus has sex with his sister when she is having her breakdown (in rain that may or may not have been in hr head). There are also hints that he is homosexual. For me, regardless of these hints, his conflict is multifaceted and his agony pure. In addition to his adolescent sexual frustrations, he also has issues with his father, which are “resolved” in the final scene of the film.
I say “resolved” because this last scene seems weak to me, almost as if Bergman is coping out of following his themes to the end. Minus and his father are discussing the nature of reality and God, and the father says that God is, in some way, love. It’s as if Bergman was merely toeing the water of faith crises, and when his own art took him somewhere too dark for his liking, he had his ready made excuse.
I am unsure, at this time, if I will watch the remaining films in this quasi-trilogy. i have heard that Winter Light is Bergman at his peak, but I am unsure that’s somewhere I want to go. Probably.
