the silence (w&d bergman)

The third in a Bergman trilogy.

Spanish dwarf troupe - tick

Kid out of tin drum - tick

Psychological warfare - tick

Adorable elderly hotel worker - tick

Language games - tick

Playfulness - tick

Female sexuality - tick

Imposing female characters - tick

Mystery - tick

Plot clarity - cross

Narrative ‘development’ - cross

The last two are perhaps the most intriguing. This is a film that takes place over the course of little more than twenty four hours. (The three Bergman films I have seen this week have a carefully composed and restricted timeframe). The film starts and ends on a train, but at no point do we know where the boy and his mother are going. ‘Home’ apparently, but what home is or means is never clear. The boy’s father is alive but we don’t know if he’s going to be there. We don’t know why they, and the woman’s dying translator sister, left home in the first place. We know the women want things - not to die, to connect physically with someone - but we don’t know why one is at death’s door and the other is picking up a stray man whose language she can’t speak. A tank dawdles down a nighttime street and we don’t know whether it belongs to the good guys or the bad guys. There’s a transcendent absence of clarity. And yet this film is one of the most remarkable, engaging films you will ever see. It’s a dream state, a child’s eye view, a lacuna, a pause in the earth’s turning. Which is also what going to the cinema is.

Things I love about Bergman: you never quite know what to expect with his films. In spite of his reputation there is no model. Each film has an idiosyncratic flavour. All those years ago, when the Electric was still a fleapit, I was taken to watch a double bill. Time of the Wolf and Le Mepris. I didn’t value Bergman then. Godard seemed more sexy. I was wrong about that, probably, and it took many years for me to start to separate the films from the myth about the films. Claro, they contain darkness, they contain their stuff of the human spirit, but they also contain such light, such perfect shading, such nuance.