The Great Movies III

Later, when Jonas returns and describes his fears that the world will end in nuclear destruction, all Tomas can say is, "We must trust in the Lord." Then, when Tomas stands up, Nykvist's camera tilts down to his fingers on the desk, hesitating, trembling, and then Tomas confesses to Jonas: he feels he is a bad pastor, he is anguished by the silence of God, he has lost his faith. Jonas leaves, and soon word comes that he drove to a nearby river and shot himself with his rifle.

Tomas resolves to visit Karin and the family. Marta drives him.' They stop at her home for cold medicine, and she embraces him and urges him to accept her love. Tomas rejects her, citing his one true love, his wife who died four years earlier. And then, in a passage of lacerating cruelty, he enumerates everything he finds disgusting about Marta-her fussing, her weeping, her rashes on hands and head (recalling the wounds of Christ). He is pitiless, then storms out, hesitates, and unexpectedly asks her to join him in going to the fisherman's widow.

There is more silence here than the silence of God. Tomas's late wife is wrapped in the silence of the grave. Tomas is silent to the need of the fisherman. He cannot respond to Marta's love except by stern silence and rejection. Fredrik, the church organist, is silent in the way he pays no attention to the service and wishes for it to be over. Those who are not silent, such as the fisherman and his wife, ask for help and receive none.

But then there is Algot, the crooked sexton. He alone of all these people seems to have given more thought to the suffering of Christ than to his own suffering. His insights into Christ's passion are convincing and empathetic, but the pastor cannot hear him, he is wrapped in his own cold indifference.

Cowie speaks of a moment when Marta and Tomas are stopped on the road for a train to pass. "My parents dreamed of me becoming a pastor," he tells her. Cowie thinks that the pastor stands for Bergman at that moment-Bergman, the son of a strict Lutheran who listened to his father's sanctimonious sermons in church and then came home to cruel punishments.

I wonder if there are other ways in which Bergman speaks through the character of the pastor. We know that he was much married, and thought of himself before his women. In his screenplay for Faithless (2000), directed by Liv Ullmann, he plays an old director who hires an actress to help him visualize a story about how he mistreated women, and wants to be forgiven. Is Winter Light also not a portrait of a man who is cruel to a woman who only wants to love and help him? Is it not the cry of an artist who fears his message has not been heard? Is his art the father who has forsaken him? Has he been powerless to help those who came to him in real need, while focusing on his career and his reputation?

To the degree that Winter Light is autobiographical, and that we will never know, it is the portrait of a man who thought he was God, and failed himself.

wo women and a boy share a compartment on a train. It is an unhappy journey, and we sense tension and dislike between the women.The boywan-ders out into the corridor, stares at other passengers, watches as another train passes by, its cars carrying armored tanks. The train stops in an unnamed city, and the three check into a hotel. So begins Ingmar Bergman's The Silence (1963), the third part of his Silence of God trilogy. If Winter Light (1962) directly referred to God's silence, and Through a Glass Darkly (1961) did so by implication, there is no theology in The Silence-only a world bereft of it.

We learn about the characters indirectly, through their dialogue; a reference to their father reveals that they are sisters. One is Ester (Ingrid Thulin), a translator, a woman who looks severe, pained, disappointed. She is dying. The other is Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), younger, more voluptuous, impatient with this journey. Although they are apparently going "home," there is no indication of where they were or why they went there, and no clear idea of where they are. Even Ester, the translator, doesn't recognize the language, and in a European grand hotel, it is odd that the hall porter speaks no German or English.

The boy, not yet an adolescent, is Johan (Jorgen Lindstrom). He has an angelic face and a sweet nature. He is Anna's son, but apparently has long lived in the middle between the two spiteful sisters. The reason for their spite is never specified, but goes back to childhood and obscurely involves their father. Now that Ester is dying, Anna has little pity for her and flaunts the fact that she is going out into the city-for sex, we somehow understand, or at least as a show of disloyalty.