1960-1969

The Carabineers (1963)

André Crous

The Carabineers has a thought or two about wars and the people who fight them but is mostly just an excuse for Jean-Luc Godard to separate image and sound from each other.

Les carabiniersFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean Gruault
Roberto Rossellini
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Les carabiniers

There are moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers when it seems the director is about to say something of real importance about the immorality of warfare or the pointlessness of killing one’s fellow men and women. But no. Nine times out of ten, he would rather engage in experimental (mostly audio, sometimes visual) gimmicks. As a result, the film ends up being about as ineffectual as its dimwitted central characters.

The opening screen may be the most important of the entire enterprise. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges in a 1963 interview with Madeleine Chapsal from L’Express, a handwritten title card informs us that “More and more, I’m striving for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. Basically, that’s what is eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes, or death is like sleep.” Given the eccentric behaviour of its characters and the minimalist sets they inhabit, Godard’s film can’t be considered even remotely realistic. This quotation seems the best possible key to understanding the film as a kind of macabre caricature of reality, closer to theatre than cinema.

For one thing, the main characters are two brothers inexplicably called Ulysses and Michelangelo. One of them is married to a vampy but rather dishevelled woman named Cleopatra, the other to a Venus. No one resembles their literary or historical namesake in the slightest. It is possible Godard simply attributed high and mighty names to these floundering fools as a way of extending the film’s attitude toward war in general – an activity that, after all, is often described in undeservedly glowing terms.

Godard, whose The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) – made in 1961 but not released until 1963 – already showcased the director’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to war, disabuses the viewer very quickly of any notion that warfare is heroic. In the opening scene, riflemen arrive at a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere (the surroundings are more barren than the moonscape) to deliver a letter from the king to draft Ulysses and Michelangelo into the army. Importantly, we are never told what country or which ideals they are fighting to protect, nor who the enemy is. But one of the carabineers (riflemen) tells the young men they may do whatever they want because “in war, anything goes”. And this is where Godard lands his most direct blow:

Michelangelo: I got a question.
Carabineer: Go ahead.
M.: In the war, can we take slot machines?
C.: Yes.
M.: No charges if we take old men’s eyeglasses? Can we break a kid’s arm? Both arms? Stab a guy in the back? Rob apartments? Burn towns? Burn women?
C.: Yes.
M.: And steal classy trousers?
C.: Yes.
M.: If we want, we can massacre innocent folks?
C.: Yes.
M.: Denounce folks, too?
C.: Yes.
M.: Eat in restaurants without paying?
C.: Yes, yes. That’s war.

As usual with Godard, the point could have been made much more succinctly, but it still lands. And soon, egged on by Cleopatra and Venus who see dollar signs where others see violence and bloodshed, the two men are off to war. What follows are snippets of life on the front. One of the biggest action scenes involves a lone tank driving around an ashen countryside with fewer than 10 riflemen in tow. We hear a lot of gunfire but see almost nothing. From time to time, a bomb explodes in the fields, but no one is injured. The representation is clearly theatrical and not meant to be taken as a realistic depiction.

Unfortunately, Godard’s distinct brand of alienation continuously prevents us from becoming emotionally involved. Everyone is shot offscreen or shown getting killed very far away. Onscreen excerpts from the soldiers’ letters back home speak of incredible violence (“We rip women’s rings from their fingers and make people undress before shooting them, naked, next to an anti-tank trap”), but we never witness any of this. Perhaps the men are lying, or perhaps Godard is too busy reinventing the war film to realise a fully functional machine (a story told on film) is more interesting than seeing it disassembled, rearranged and barely operational.

Not only is the violence made banal by being presented in its separate audio and visual components, but there is not a single recognisable human soul we can empathise with. Confronted with loud shots of gunfire but rarely seeing guns being fired or people getting killed, we feel nothing. The presentation of a near-rape is so matter-of-fact it is almost comical, and Godard’s willingness to steer us in this direction is monstrous.

Moreover, the film does not contain a shred of everyday humanity. When the men return home at the end of their tour, they are emotionless. Cleopatra and Venus, who have been cheating on them, show no emotion either. For nearly 10 minutes, they throw some postcards around, which appear as stand-ins for the real things, but what exactly Godard is trying to say about this blurry distinction between life and representation is unclear. Earlier in the film, Michelangelo had saluted a Rembrandt self-portrait, and Ulysses was mesmerised by Barnaba da Modena’s painting of “Madonna and Child”, but everything feels terribly ad hoc, not part of a larger, well-developed message.

After an extensive mish-mash of scenes from the “battlefield”, the story comes to an abrupt conclusion, closely following in the footsteps of Godard’s previous feature, My Life to Live. In this respect, the film does tie itself tightly to the fate of its characters: When it ends, their story ends; and thus, they must end, as well. While far from unappealing, The Carabineers lacks characters for us to become attached to, and ultimately, this mostly feels like just another contrarian exercise for the director to amuse himself with.

Die Kandidaat (1968)

André Crous

More than 50 years after its release at the height of apartheid, Jans Rautenbach’s Die Kandidaat has lost none of its bravery nor any of its razor-sharp comedy.

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Jans Rautenbach
Screenwriters:
Jans Rautenbach
Emil Nofal
Director of Photography:
Vincent G. Cox

Running time: 100 minutes

During the nearly 50 years of apartheid in South Africa, Afrikaans was the language of authority. In terms of power, the country belonged to Afrikaans whites first, then to English whites, then to no one else. When Die Kandidaat (literally “The Candidate”, although the film never had an English title) opened in 1968, the turmoil from abroad broke on the African shores, and the result was a breathtakingly robust manifestation of artistic resistance to the staid and seemingly stern status quo of segregation. All without featuring a single non-white character.

The director, Jans Rautenbach, was all of 31 years old when he directed this, his first film as a solo director. Boiling contemporary Afrikaner society down to nine representatives on the board of a big Afrikaans company, the Adriaan Delport Foundation, he exposes factional infighting and uncertainty with seriousness, insight and generous helpings of comic relief when conservative and progressive viewpoints are pitted against each other. 

These representatives, in whose company we spend most of the film, are:

  • Lourens Niemand, businessman and chairman of the board
  • Paula Neethling, the founder’s daughter (and apparent socialite)
  • Reverend Perholdt from the Dutch Reformed Church
  • Anna Volschenk, head of an Afrikaans women’s organisation
  • Herman Botha, farmer
  • Prof. Hannes van Biljon, proponent of the Afrikaans language
  • Wilhelm Esterhuysen, carpenter
  • HP Greeff, deputy secretary in the civil service
  • Anton du Toit, writer

The nine board members are tasked with protecting and propagating the culture and alleged values of Afrikaans speakers. They are meeting to choose a new CEO, and according to the charter, their decision has to be unanimous. But the boardroom is not a homogeneous entity, and people’s views – however slight the difference between them – easily create divisions. 

The titular final candidate for the position is Dr Jan le Roux (Roelf Jacobs), an outwardly strait-laced member of society who runs Seunsdorp, a reform school for teenage boys who have lost their way. The board’s chairman, Lourens Niemand (Gert van den Bergh, who died on the eve of shooting his final scene), and Paula Neethling (Marié du Toit), who wields extraordinary power even though (or because) she is the late founder’s daughter, are adamant about pushing the nomination through as quickly as possible. Their strategy is to allay their fellow board members’ fears with a mere wave of the hand. But one of them, a writer called Anton du Toit, has done his homework. Not only does he want to undermine Paula’s authority for personal reasons, but as a writer of the Sixties movement, he wants to stir the pot. And stir it he does.

Before long, he recalls that the foundation’s regulations require that the CEO be a “genuine Afrikaner”. This ostensibly innocuous moniker quickly leads the nine decision-makers to discuss the label’s applicability to those who do not fit the stereotype. In a country where “Afrikanerness” rests on so many different pillars, the latter’s various definitions can overlap each other rather imperfectly. Are so-called coloured South Africans (of mixed heritage), most of whom speak Afrikaans as a first language, also Afrikaners? Are white speakers of Afrikaans who do not belong to one of the main Protestant denominations? And those who do not follow the governing National Party? And those who have an English spouse?

These questions quickly create division among the members, thus pointedly indicating an unspoken division within white South Africa, too. In a couple of brilliantly timed moments of levity, the arguments even escalate to fisticuffs. Despite the glossy veneer of the boardroom, with its stained glass windows and statues of Afrikaans heroes (according to the government of the day), these men and women can still grab each other by the throat when they get hot and bothered by a viewpoint they don’t share. But while Du Toit is the one stoking the fire, it is the eloquent albeit slightly uptight Le Roux who serves as the flint.

Rautenbach’s opening credits sequence cleverly depicts this symbolism. A series of static shots showing statues made of stone turns dynamic with the appearance of Le Roux. In fact, his arrival appears to have a material effect on the camera. The initially immobile frame suddenly embarks on a whirlwind of a semi-circle movement. The rest of the sequence consists almost exclusively of shots obtained by either moving (tracking shots) or swivelling the camera (pans). 

The scenes in the boardroom are a bit of a one-man show, with the heterodox writer, Du Toit, asking all the taboo questions. But we know he is right, and therefore, we are always on his side. His anti-establishment streak also clearly targets the board’s two most powerful members, Niemand and Neethling.

Neethling is the one with the most authority, however, and her outfits both emulate and rival those of Cleopatra. By contrast, Niemand, whose surname literally and very appropriately means “nobody”, is a vacuous embarrassment. Throughout the film, he is slow and completely befuddled, loses his train of thought and cuts a pathetic figure when he puffs on his cigar. He is a pushover for whatever Neethling wants, and we realise right at the end that she was blackmailing him all along. As a symbol of the upper echelons of power in Afrikaans society, his character is a devastating indictment of the absence of direction at the top.

The action is set almost exclusively in just two locations, but what Die Kandidaat lacks for in breadth it more than makes up for in depth. And while the scenes in the board room are the most daring, half the story concerns an evolving tragedy at Seunsdorp, and we gradually come to realise how the two tracks fit together both narratively and thematically. One of the boys gets injured while spraying chemicals outside. A troublemaker and hardened criminal, Izak, who instigated the incident, fingers a shy classmate, Kallie (Regardt van den Bergh), as the culprit. There is a diversity of thought and character here among the Afrikaner boys, too, and it is not always easy to label any of them as either good or bad. Once they are branded as a problem, however, as someone who doesn’t belong in society, they carry that label with them for the rest of their lives, like a skin they can’t shed.

In this regard, the discussions at the foundation are fundamentally related to the ups and downs of these boys on the fringes of society. As a former member of a youth gang, Le Roux is the perfect bridge between the two worlds. Far from the modern art and the book-lined walls of this bubble of Afrikaner superiority, he has a much more practical approach to spreading the gospel of Afrikanerness.

But the many skeletons that tumble out of the closet in the board room are a thing to behold. Through their slips of the tongue, naïveté and revelations of closely guarded secrets, we discover many of the supposedly upstanding representatives of Afrikaner society are, in fact, human, after all, and differ from each other, even if that is the last thing the government wants. We learn that Neethling’s late husband, the previous director of the foundation, was a true disaster. We learn that she jilted Du Toit for Le Roux, and he abandoned her for someone else, although the film’s timeline is a bit muddled. Greeff’s wife speaks English. Le Roux is engaged to an English-speaking South African, and she’s Catholic, too. Niemand has the biggest secret of them all, but it is the arch-conservative Mrs Volschenk who gives the film its most priceless moment in an exchange with the controversial Du Toit, whose literary work she considers indecent:

Volschenk: You can’t tell me anything about “life”! My husband and I travel abroad quite often. Last year in Paris, I also encountered your “sex”. All of a sudden, these… girls… started chatting to my husband out on the street. It was terrible. I was so shocked that my husband put his foot down and ordered me to head back to the hotel at once to calm down. The poor man. He didn’t return to the hotel until several hours later.

Du Toit: I bet he was very tired…

Volschenk: Well, naturally.

Rautenbach builds on and vastly surpasses the entertainment of King Hendrik, a political comedy released three years earlier and directed by Emil Nofal, who co-wrote and produced Die Kandidaat. King Hendrik, set in a South African town that was never fully incorporated and, thus, decides to declare independence, trod carefully around (but didn’t completely ignore) hot-button issues like apartheid and Afrikaans–English relations. For Nofal, the drama of division was a source of comedy rather than reflection, but in Die Kandidaat, Rautenbach strikes the right balance by intensifying the drama while letting the lighter moments bubble to the surface when appropriate to reinforce the drama.

More than half a century after its release, Die Kandidaat remains an extraordinary piece of political cinema, especially because the questions it poses about Afrikanerness have never been adequately answered. It never feels like the work of a first-time director with too little life experience or who is trying to say too much. On the surface an inquiry into the slippery definition of an Afrikaner, it offers an honest appraisal of Afrikaans society, warts and all. It is a film that likely would not have received any support from the Adriaan Delport Foundation. But there’s no making a masterpiece by simply playing by the rules, and pushing the envelope can often get the message further.

Harakiri (1962)

André Crous

Two riveting storylines connected by Tatsuya Nakadai’s powerhouse performance turn Harakiri into a deeply affecting examination of human morality and dignity in the face of injustice and deception.

HarakiriJapan
4.5*

Director:
Masaki Kobayashi
Screenwriter: 
Shinobu Hashimoto
Director of Photography:
Yoshio Miyajima

Running time: 130 minutes

Original title: 切腹
Transliterated title: Seppuku

Harakiri is not only one of the best samurai films but one of the best films in Japanese cinema. Dealing with issues ranging from loyalty, honour and family to peer pressure and hypocrisy, it advances on two tracks. The first is the present (late afternoon on 13 May 1630), in which a samurai from a former clan has been reduced to living in poverty and asks to commit suicide in the Iyi clan’s forecourt. His name is Hanshiro Tsugumo, and Tatsuya Nakadai’s assured portrayal of the character is mesmerising. The second is the story-within-a-story in which a young man named Motome Chijiwa arrived a few months earlier with the same request but met a harrowing end.

The connective tissue between these two tracks is Hanshiro. He had been best friends with Motome’s father, Jinnai, during their time serving the Fukushima clan in Hiroshima. When the clan collapsed in 1619, Jinnai committed suicide. But to prevent Hanshiro from following his example, he entrusted Motome to his care. Eventually, Motome would become his son-in-law.

Hanshiro subsequently moved to Edo and barely supported himself by making umbrellas with his daughter. Although this was not the life of a samurai, Hanshiro continued to adhere to the values he accrued during his service. That is, until he lost his entire family and realised that the samurai of the Iyi clan were laughing at the misery of the poorer classes.

Harakiri is both mentally and emotionally affecting because it questions the often undisputed moral authority of the samurai. It is no coincidence that the director’s name in the opening credits sequence quite literally impales the revered suit of armour symbolising the glory of the Iyi clan. At many turns – sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes with grave seriousness – Hanshiro speaks some truth about the disparity between the perception of the samurai and how they really behave. They are made of flesh and blood and are not gods; they are fallible, not invincible; they are men and have the same faults as all other men; and they are not monolithic: They are good and bad and can be virtuous or vile.

The fullness of this complexity is gradually laid bare as Hanshiro presents his reasoning for committing suicide. The title refers to the act of disembowelment that the Japanese sword-wielding retainers, in particular, performed for reasons associated with honour. Samurai were expected to plunge their own blades into their stomachs as their weapon is as much a part of the warrior as his soul. Notwithstanding the reason for executing it, seppuku, as the Japanese call it, is a gruesome act. In the case of Motome, however, there is a (grim and sadistic) twist to the self-execution, albeit under the pretence of tradition.

Hanshiro says that samurai honour (bushido) is nothing more than a façade. Initially, we suspect he may be taunting the Iyi clan and all the samurai assembled around him in the courtyard. But when he recounts the circumstances that led to Motome coming to them, as well as their mocking tone upon returning his corpse, we see he has very good reasons for doing so. These reasons appear all the more justified during the climax when the house’s samurai culture is decisively stripped of its veneer. Among the samurai, violence is all too often prioritised over dialogue and understanding, and group pressure can end a life.

The screenplay is the work of Shinobu Hashimoto, who wrote many an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece, including Seven Samurai and Ikiru, during his storied career. But in terms of rhythm, subversiveness and clarity, Harakiri arguably surpasses all of them. Besides the clever links between the two tracks of the narrative, we also get numerous surprises as Hanshiro makes a major revelation almost every time he opens his mouth.

This quick-paced disclosure of context and no shortage of secrets, as well as Nakadai’s perfectly modulated acting – quite the opposite of Toshiro Mifune’s exaggerated kabuki performances in Kurosawa’s films – keep us enthralled throughout the two-hour running time, half of which takes place at a single location. And yet, we have no idea where all of this is leading. The information we receive tells us everything about the present, but the developments remain unwritten. Sustained by an eerie but entrancing biwa on the soundtrack, this tension of possibility continues right to the end, when a surprising string of deaths (in flashback) culminates in an unforgettable climax.

Kageyu Saito, the senior counsellor who oversees the two harakiri ritual ceremonies, exemplifies how strength is often just weakness reinforced by the strict enforcement of rules. Saito is hesitant and uncertain, but he implements the rules he knows. When these prove to be ineffective, he panics. But with no moral foundation of his own and unwilling to get his hands dirty (he never draws his sword), he resorts to underhanded tactics. This includes besmirching a genuine samurai and rewriting history to maintain his clan’s reputation. But we, the audience, know the truth. And as our knowledge increases, our empathy grows for both Hanshiro and Motome.

Kurosawa may be the artist in samurai cinema, but Harakiri leaves no doubt that Kobayashi is the master storyteller. Every line of dialogue in the film is essential and either clearly sets the scene or drives the story forward. We can discern the gravity of the circumstances from the words alone and have no need for histrionic performances. Nakadai is serene but stands strong thanks to his character’s unassailable moral rectitude.

This is the kind of masterpiece that exposes its competitors as vacuous pretenders, regardless of their directors’ pedigree.

Mouchette (1967)

André Crous

Robert Bresson was a thoughtful theorist on how to construct a film, but his characters do not resemble flesh-and-blood human beings. The widely praised Mouchette is among the worst offenders.
Mouchette

France
2.5*

Director:
Robert Bresson
Screenwriter:
Robert Bresson
Director of Photography:
Ghislain Cloquet

Running time: 80 minutes

Sometimes, even when confronted with material that ought to bring us to tears, there is no other way to respond than with boundless laughter. This is the case with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, a terribly acted film about an innocent girl enduring one tragedy after another without any hope of salvation.

In a way, the audience should be able to sympathise with her because for them the possibility of salvation is equally elusive. Mouchette is a tragic pile-up of calamities, both in the life of its main character and in the art of filmmaking itself. Transitioning from one disaster (humiliation, death, rape) to the next is just one part of the equation, but Bresson rarely knows how to direct scenes with dialogue and is even worse when it comes to personal interaction.

(In)famous for using non-actors in his film, Bresson gives the titular role to the 16-year-old Nadine Nortier. She had never appeared in a film before and would not do so again. Her character is in a truly miserable situation. With a mother on death’s door and an alcoholic father, she has to take care of her baby brother. She has another brother her own age, but somehow he manages to be absent from most of the film. And because of her simple clothing, clog-like shoes and reserved manner, her classmates and imperious teachers relentlessly pick on her. Of course, as with many other female characters in Bresson’s films (Au hasard Balthazar immediately comes to mind), she bears it all with a brave face but no push-back.

The one glimmer of hope peeking out from among the rubble of the girl’s existence is a bumper car ride. Although the staging lacks even a modicum of creativity, we finally see Mouchette emote without looking like a wooden Bressonian model. A well-dressed young man her age repeatedly bumps into her car, which turns her melancholy into joyful laughter. However, we can’t forget that this is a tragedy with a capital T. The scenes ends almost as quickly as it begins. When she is about to speak to the boy, her drunken father suddenly appears and hits her across the face. She silently yields to his authority and accompanies him back to the bar, albeit with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Halfway through the silent agony that is her existence, Mouchette is raped by a sleazy poacher named Arsène. Fortunately, unlike her counterpart in Balthazar, she doesn’t start dating the rapist. (Although she eventually calls him her lover, her motivation for doing so is much clearer than it was for Balthazar‘s Marie.) But the scene is an absolute farce. Mouchette and Arsène move hesitantly, in slow motion and without emotion towards and away from each other. He weakly grabs at her, she weakly repels him and then silently relents. We only hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace – a shockingly unsavoury metaphor for a director renowned for his use of sound.

Another metaphor – morally less objectionable but even more ham-handed – that the film deploys involves the hunt. In one of the first scenes, we see Arsène setting traps for pheasants. And in the film’s penultimate scene, Mouchette, whose name literally means “little fly”, witnesses a rabbit hunt. The viewer would have to be blind to overlook the explicit comparison.

But what is really grating about the film is Bresson’s apparent inability to create realistic drama. When Mouchette somehow loses her shoe in the mud, she takes a seat a few feet away. Quite a while later, Arsène appears, notices that she has lost her shoe, then takes her to his cabin and leaves her there before going back to the same spot to retrieve the shoe in the middle of a rainstorm. None of this makes any sense. The director so desperately seeks to inject drama into his film that he grasps as wholly incredible straws. Despite some nifty editing, the film’s final scene is not much better.

It boggles the mind why Bresson continues to be hailed as a visionary filmmaker. He certainly benefited from the admiration of the Cahiers crowd, but frankly, he was a one-trick pony. One of his first films, A Man Escaped, released in 1956, was a minimalist but tense work of genius. But it seems like the work of an entirely different and much more capable man than the one who subsequently made Pickpocket (whose interesting visuals barely compensated for the performance of its lead actor), and then Balthazar and Mouchette, both of which contain extraordinarily inept bits of acting throughout.

Mouchette feels out of step with its time, and not in a good way. Except for the bumper cars and the two hunting scenes, there is little dynamism, and a succession of setbacks suggests there is little to hope for and disengages us from the narrative. This little fly deserves to be swatted away.

Carriage to Vienna (1966)

André Crous

With gorgeous photography and a soundtrack that has religious undertones, Carriage to Vienna reminds us that the terror of the Reich’s occupiers spilled over into horrors committed by the previously occupied Czechs.

Carriage to ViennaCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Karel Kachyňa
Screenwriters:
Jan Procházka
Karel Kachyňa
Director of Photography:
Josef Illík

Running time: 75 minutes

Original title: Kočár do Vídně
Alternate English title: Coach to Vienna

A road movie unlike any other, Karel Kachyňa’s Carriage to Vienna is also a thriller and an absolutely devastating indictment of the Czech nation after the Second World War. Set in the forests of Moravia, close to the Czechoslovakia–Austria border, the story covers roughly 24 tumultuous hours in the life of a young widow named Krista (an enigmatic, quietly brooding Iva Janžurová).

The opening crawl informs us that an anonymous “they” had hanged Krista’s husband the previous night for stealing a few sacks of cement. It’s the first week of Mary 1945, and we can reasonably assume it was Germans who did the killing. A few hours later, as day is breaking, two soldiers (one of them suffering serious injuries) appear on her doorstep and force her to take them to the border. They say they are Austrian, not “Reichsdeutschen”, although in wartime this is a distinction without a difference. Thus begins a daylong horse-drawn carriage ride through the misty forest.

Krista doesn’t speak a word. By contrast, Hans (Jaromír Hanzlík), the young German soldier sitting beside her on the carriage, is positively giddy. He can’t stop talking or moving about. Perhaps it is because the war is at an end and he has survived the ordeal. Maybe because he is going home. Or because this quiet and mysterious but seemingly submissive girl is taking him to freedom. He shows her photos of his family and his home in Vienna.

It has to be said that Hans is portrayed as far more naïve than malicious. Unlike Krista, whose life is in immediate danger, he is high-strung to the point of nearly snapping in half. And although he had been in the service of far-right fascism, he is clearly also human. In post-war Czechoslovak cinema, this was a big shift from the previous representations of German soldiers as uniformly malevolent.

However, all is not quite as it seems. We are constantly aware of the various weapons on board: The Germans have rifles and a pistol, but Krista has an axe concealed underneath the carriage. Slowly but surely, as the second soldier, Günther, loses consciousness and Hans is easily distracted, Krista disposes of the weapons one by one.  These moments are elegantly brought to our attention when the carriage moves on and the camera stays behind to discreetly reveal the items discarded in the bushes.

Beautiful organ music played by Milan Šlechta suffuses the soundtrack as we watch the trees stretching up to the heavens contrast starkly with the fog in black and white. Over time, we come to realise that the trees themselves are, in a way, the organ pipes, and we find ourselves in a sacred space where good and evil have come to do battle. Krista spends the first half of the film in silent contemplation, and it is riveting to behold. But despite the almost ethereal audiovisual atmosphere, we can feel the tension building. Will she or won’t she use the weapons on the Germans? Will they or won’t they discover what she is doing?

Then, things take a sharp turn, and the film ends in a stunning obliteration of sympathy. We had gone most of the film on the side of the underdog, hoping that Krista would escape and perhaps even take revenge for enduring the war and losing her husband hours earlier. But with the front line drawing closer, and Hans’s head is in her lap, she does not kill him. In fact, she makes a decision that can most charitably be described as unexpected, if not downright cuckoo. And yet, while her later actions may seem erratic, the very real impact of the war on her way of life cannot be underestimated.

However, Carriage to Vienna will be best remembered for its powerful final scene, which calls to mind the brutal postwar expulsion of Czech Germans. (The same applied to Hungarians, although they did not have the added burden of their people directly supporting genocide during the war.) For reasons that are easy to guess but morally questionable, anyone who was “ethnically” German was persona non grata in the newly liberated Czechoslovakia. The country’s president, Edvard Beneš, issued decrees to the effect that such individuals, even if they had lived in the Czech lands for generations, would lose their citizenship and be deported to the countries of their forefathers.

Kachyňa’s film requires just a single, well-placed scene to drive its point home about the violent backlash after the war. Its portrayal of German soldiers as people who fought on the wrong side rather than machines of immorality is equally bold. And although the film’s first half is far superior to its second, it may be one of the best and most important works of art the country has ever produced.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

André Crous

Despite the two big names with top billing and some good ideas, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a fragmented mess of a film whose literal golden glow cannot save it from mediocrity.

Reflections in a Golden EyeUSA
3*

Director:
John Huston
Screenwriters:
Gladys Hill
Chapman Mortimer
Director of Photography:
Aldo Tonti

Running time: 105 minutes

Everything that is golden isn’t gold. The visuals of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, which not only has two major stars as a dysfunctional couple in the South but also deals with issues of intensely repressed sexuality, are tinted gold. Every now and again, a pink dress or red streak of blood break through, but the rest is a lifeless olive-gold that is perfectly in tune with the beige of the ubiquitous military uniforms.

The film is a very muddled assortment of lust and betrayal. Everything is tenuously held together by identical bookend quotations from the original novel by Carson McCullers, which read: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” Alright, so there will be a murder, but the film’s six characters show so little development that any one of them could be shot and we’d barely even notice.

Marlon Brando plays Major Penderton, who teaches courses on leadership at the local military post. With one or two notable exceptions, he is expressionless, a block of ice completely resistant to the Southern heat. His wife is Leonora, whom Elizabeth Taylor portrays with the same kind of drunken, free-spirited and emotional callousness as she did in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We never learn what the backstory is to this unlikeliest of couples. We meet them when the marriage is already long over, and Leonora is having daily dalliances with their next-door neighbour, Lieutenant Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith).

Langdon’s wife, Alison (Julie Harris), is still traumatised after losing her baby three years ago but is lucid enough to recognise that her husband is having an affair. However, being the polar opposite of extrovert Leonora, she deliberately ignores the obvious signs. She spends her days mostly in the company of the family’s effeminate Filipino “houseboy”, Anacleto, a dreadful bit of acting by Zorro David. The character has one brilliant scene in which he throws a drink at a group of gossiping officers before fading into the wallpaper again. And then there is the taciturn private Williams (Robert Forster), who notices Leonora walking naked through the house and subsequently returns every night to look at her up close and smell her underwear.

For obvious reasons, Major Penderton has the most potential. After Williams does some work in his garden, Penderton spots him on horseback in his birthday suit. Soon, the staring begins, as Penderton simply cannot control himself in public whenever he spots the young private. But these feelings of confusion and anguish are not developed in any serious way. They merely sketch out some vague explanation for the expected murder. At one lecture, Penderton’s mind seems to wonder when he asks the students, “Is leadership learned, is it taught, [or] is man born with it?” At another point, he waxes lyrical about the military life, which is “immaculate in its hard, young fitness”. But he seems to be stuck for good.

Brando’s best moments come either when he is on his own or when he demolishes his character’s icy exterior. When he is on his own, he gallantly but rather pathetically tries to lift weights, he stares into a mirror to rehearse his witty lines and facial expressions for a social event at his own home. Or he spreads a handful of rejuvenating cream over his face, not unlike a clown before a show. These are sad but intimate moments that allow us a glimpse of Penderton’s melancholy existence as an act that might allow him to blend in. But the scenes in which his well-kept façade disintegrates are equally powerful. The way his face contorts when Leonore taunts him, or when his horse refuses to listen to him, makes for very compelling cinema.

The scene with the horse is absolutely astonishing. When Penderton had earlier gone riding with his wife and her lover, he fell off the horse. Now he takes his wife’s prize stallion, Thunderbird, but when he kicks in the side, it bolts into the forest. The thick foliage scratches and scrapes his face. He holds on for dear life. And Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score kicks into high gear. But it is the low-angle, titled camerawork and the rapid editing, in particular, that draw attention. The confused, all-too-human look of utter desperation on Brando’s face and his violent but futile response are pitiful but make him the most interesting character of all.

The title ostensibly refers to a drawing by Anacleto of a peacock, which has a “tiny and grotesque” golden eye. But as with so much else in the film, this inference also goes nowhere. While some moments are reflected (in gold) in Williams’s left eye, especially when he is leering at Leonore from afar, the metaphor is impenetrable.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is a terribly uneven film that unspools in fits and starts. It has enough characters with promising storylines to fit three feature-length films, but it doesn’t dig into any of them. The tensest scenes are the ones between Taylor and Brando, but they are few and far between. The plot ultimately explodes with an unintentionally hilarious final shot (multiple whip pans between murderer and murdered, with a startled bystander sandwiched in between). The film has the makings of a fascinating social study, but its fragments never cohere into anything resembling a whole.

Daisies (1966)

André Crous

Věra Chytilová’s inventive Daisies is never straightforward, and more than 50 years on, it still has some kooky flashes of brilliance.

Daisies SedmikráskyCzechoslovakia
4*

Director:
Věra Chytilová
Screenwriters:
Věra Chytilová
Ester Krumbachová
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Sedmikrásky

Her name might be “Jarmila”, or it could be “Julie”. That is how she variously introduces herself to others. She calls her best friend “Marcelka” in public, but when they’re alone, they address each other as “Marie”. This is all beside the point, however, because the name that shines the brightest across this quirky narrative landscape is “Věra”.

The two young women in question have come to be referred to as the dark-haired “Marie I” (Jitka Cerhová) and the fair-haired “Marie II” (Ivana Karbanová), the stars of Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film, Daisies (Sedmikrásky). The duo is not only the story’s main characters but also the only characters of any consequence. This is their tale, and they couldn’t care less about the people around them, especially the men. (Every single scene would pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.) In fact, the same may be said of Chytilová’s attitude towards traditional narrative filmmaking.

Considered one of the highlights of the Czech New Wave, Daisies made a splash for a whole host of reasons. In the director’s native Czechoslovakia, it sparked controversy upon its release, and its local distribution was heavily suppressed after it drew the ire of the country’s president. A few months later, a deputy in the National Assembly called it “trash” and heatedly enquired what the film might offer “working people in factories, in fields and on construction sites”. One specific point of criticism he had was the film’s apparent delight in showing food wastage.

Admittedly, it does feature a stunning amount of food being wasted, and no reference is made to factories, fields or construction sites. The goal was to offer a different vision: a story that, on the surface, is far removed from the humdrum of everyday life but pokes the stifling social order by using a wild and atypical approach to depict the escapades of two happy-go-lucky girls. Chytilová issued a particular challenge to the country’s totalitarian government because her criticism was wrapped up in an exuberantly artistic sensibility – one whose subversive message was evident but difficult to define and, thus, perturbed those seeking to control creative endeavours.

In the first seven decades of the cinematic art form, a small number of films had been made by female directors, and there had been a few more starring women in the lead roles, but these two circles hardly ever overlapped. Prior to Chytilová, women were not prohibited from making films or portraying anything other than damsels in distress or femmes fatales, but her Daisies broke the mould: It was directed by a woman, written by two women (Chytilová and influential screenwriter/costume designer Ester Krumbachová) and featured its two wholly independent-minded Maries in every single scene. It had been – and remains – a rarity for women to be so fully represented in this creative triad.

But the film’s unusual nature didn’t stop there. In contrast to the more dramatic, serious films of her peers at the time, like Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Chytilová chose to undertake a delightfully playful project. She deployed several unconventional editing techniques to inject visual surprises into her work and even undercut the male characters by having the women perform a memorable act of symbolic castration.

In the monochromatic opening scene, the Maries, wearing similarly patterned bikinis, make up their minds to shake things up. After deciding to “be bad” (in other words, to reject the status quo), they promptly jump off-screen into a brightly lit meadow, where they are shown, for the first time, in full colour. Evidently, the rather subversive implication is that being “bad” adds colour to life.

Throughout the episodic but free-flowing film, they play the children’s game Vadí nevadí (“It matters, it doesn’t matter”, similar to “Truth or Dare”) without getting flustered or hesitating to carry out each other’s wishes and, in so doing, push past social conventions. But their relationship remains undefined, and because they don’t seem to have lives beyond their friendship, they are mere ciphers, marionettes in the hands of Chytilová. At one point, sharing a bathtub filled to the brim with milk, they rightfully question whether they even exist.

Speaking of liquid being wasted, the film’s climax is a scene of such gastronomic debauchery it still hasn’t lost any of its shock value: Upon discovering a banquet-style buffet laid out in an empty hall, the two women move from one seat to the next, gorging themselves on a variety of meats, vegetables and desserts. After lobbing cakes at each other, they start throwing everything else that is edible, too, and turn the event into a proper food fight before strutting on the table, using it as a catwalk to crush the food under their high heels. All that’s missing is a literal applecart for them to upset.

The biggest twist of the knife in the heart of the regime comes a few moments later, when they suddenly decide to no longer be bad and return to being “good”: Back in monochrome, whispering to each other that hard work will make them happy, they carefully place all the broken pieces of crockery on the table, as if preparing for a meal, before lying down and meeting a grisly end. Chytilová appears to suggest that, under the strictures of communism, life is about going through the motions: You mechanically engage in (pointless) work, you pretend to be happy, and then you die – not quite the message the government wanted people to contemplate.

As she would continue to do in subsequent productions, Chytilová also shatters the illusion that men play any substantial role in women’s lives. In a very cheeky scene, Marie II uses scissors to cut a bread roll, a gherkin, some sausages, an egg and finally a banana into pieces while a man – who, significantly, is never shown – unsuccessfully tries to woo her over the phone.

But the destruction is much more widespread than a few sliced-up snacks. It also seeps into the physical manifestation of the film itself. In the restaurant, the two Maries upend convention by starting with dessert and finishing with the main course. And when Marie II devours the whole chicken she has on her plate, the camera essentially takes it personally as it begins to sputter and squirt in colour, alternately converting greys to purples, oranges, greens and blues and leaping across time. Later, to further underscore the notion that films themselves have traditionally been male, the images shatter into fragments when the Maries play with scissors.

Here and there, one can draw parallels with other films (perhaps most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark 1960 film Breathless, because of the jump-cut transitions), but Daisies is indisputably sui generis. Chytilová’s creation is a joyous celebration of turning the grim and dreary communist reality on its head and replacing it with something vivid and refreshing, albeit at times maddeningly incomprehensible.

Despite the short 80-minute running time, however, many viewers today might be put off by the characters’ lack of growth. Marie I and Marie II agree on everything, quite unlike the slow identity melding of the two women in Ingmar Bergman’s cerebral Persona, released the same year. While Daisies is dynamic and reaches for ever more imaginative ways to subvert the art form and its conventions, the Maries never face any real crisis in need of a resolution.

In addition, the visual gimmicks are inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary, the film doesn’t fall neatly into a genre, and at times the actresses’ deliberately mechanical, unnatural performances render their Maries silly and hard to relate to. They are neither glorified nor put on trial for their vapid conduct and their excess. And yet, perhaps because the “bad” behaviour they so nonchalantly engage in is much more interesting than the “good”, it doesn’t matter, because their brash hedonism is positively contagious.

Daisies may be more than 50 years old, but as a collage of female expression and a light-hearted romp in the face of suffocating state control, it holds up well and continues to entertain.

A Loaf of Bread (1960)

André Crous

A Loaf of Bread, which Jan Němec made for his FAMU graduation, is a tense, perfectly structured short film about a Jewish prisoner stealing the titular foodstuff off of a Nazi-operated train.

A Loaf of BreadCzechoslovakia
4.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriter:
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jiří Šámal

Running time: 11 minutes

The Jean Valjean character in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. In Jan Němec’s 11-minute A Loaf of Bread (Sousto), which he made as a student at FAMU, the national film school in Prague, we find a group of Jean Valjeans waiting to seize the day during the Second World War. If they are caught, the penalty will likely be much more serious than incarceration.

They are Jewish prisoners biding their time next to the train tracks in the waning days of Nazi occupation, presumably somewhere inside Czechoslovakia. Their target is a few tracks over: a train wagon containing loaves of bread. The problem? An armed Nazi officer is circling the wagon to ensure none of them gets a piece.

Němec’s screenplay is an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s autobiographical short story “The Second Round” (Druhé kolo). He wrote and directed the film when he was barely 24 years old. The adaptation is perfectly structured with a setup, an execution, a complication and a resolution. It is commendable, however, that even after the climax, there is a lingering ambiguity that leaves the film the slightest bit open-ended and does not wholly dispatch the tension that preceded it.

After all, films about Jews during the Second World War should never be neatly packaged with a spotless ending. The main characters here are not victors besting their captors but rather survivors successfully making it through yet another trial by fire. But it is not just our extratextual knowledge of events that dampens the enthusiasm, it is also the strong reminder that this is but a small victory because much bigger issues are at stake.

The plot revolves around a bread heist. Three young Jewish men check out the train containing the bread. They count the number of steps the officer takes on the other side so that they know how big the window is for one of them to run there, snatch the loaf and run back unnoticed. They draw lots. Tomáš draws the shortest stick.

He quickly accepts the responsibility, but when the time comes, the moment is almost too big, and he hesitates. One second goes by, then another, then another. He finally takes off, sprinting across the no man’s land to reach the train as the officer takes his 18th, 19th, 20th step. Tomáš only has about 35 seconds left to snatch the bread and run back unseen across the tracks. He reaches inside the truck but struggles to grab himself a loaf. The clock keeps ticking. Finally, he grabs a hold of one. But by now he barely has 5 seconds left before the officer turns the corner. As he runs and realises his time has run out, he flings the bread to his friends hiding under another train.

This central piece of the action, less than 2 minutes of the film’s total running time, plainly demonstrates Němec’s skill at building tension to breaking point with the help of the central filmmaking trio: the story, the visuals and the sound, all supporting and boosting each other. All the while, we hear someone counting the seconds. And we know they only have a window of about 56 seconds in total.

A Loaf of Bread is bookended by two brief moments of narration in Tomáš’s voice. The first is explanatory, and the last is optimistic as it conveys the vital information that the Nazi officer was much weaker than the men had anticipated. Despite the most miserable of circumstances, they are undeterred in their mission to feed themselves. Tomáš tells us that they would try again the next day, and luckily the film does not show us what happened. It is not entirely clear that the voice-over was delivered after the war, and thus, after a successful second attempt, or whether it is delivered more or less contemporaneously with the action, in which case it is not at all self-evident that they would survive another try.

When it comes to stories of the Holocaust and the railway transport of Jews, such doubt is essential in clouding out any perception of victory, even in the smallest of moments.

Diamonds of the Night (1964)

André Crous

By mixing the present reality with memories and nightmarish visions and presenting them all as a fragmented whole, Diamonds of the Night offers a personal, often surreal glimpse of the Second World War.

Diamonds of the NightCzechoslovakia
3.5*

Director:
Jan Němec
Screenwriters:
Arnošt Lustig
Jan Němec
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera

Running time: 65 minutes

Original title: Démanty noci

Diamonds of the Night is an unconventional film about two Jews during the Second World War. For one, the two central characters are taciturn to the point of almost being mute. For another, it is unclear what does and what does not happen in the moment. But it brilliantly conveys a nagging sense of being sucked into a world collapsing onto itself.

This one-hour film, Czech director Jan Němec’s début feature, is as full of contrasts as its title suggests. It is drawn from the eponymous book (more specifically, the short story entitled “Darkness Casts No Shadow”) by Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig and is filled with fragments of dreamlike memories, nightmarish visions and brutal reality. Following a black screen and the ominous tolling of a bell, the opening sequence is by far the film’s most memorable. Lasting an impressive 137 seconds, it is an exhilarating unbroken tracking shot that follows two young men (Antonín Kumbera and Ladislav Janský) uphill, frequently in close-up, as they run away from a train. Every so often, another round of bullets reminds us that this is life and death.

Finally, albeit temporarily, they reach safety deep in the forest. Because of the jackets, marked with KL, for Konzentrationslager, they were wearing, one can assume they were headed for a death camp. But the darkness they have just escaped has stained their consciousness and begins to penetrate their lived reality, too, as a giant field of rocks in the middle of the forest soon makes very clear. Suddenly, a tram passes Prague’s Municipal House in broad daylight, and we see one of these men, wearing the KL jacket, jumping in, before there is a cut back to the forest.

The film will be filled with such moments, all without any dialogue – in fact, it takes almost a full 15 minutes before either of the two men speaks a word. Many of the inserts are taken through the window of a moving vehicle, presumably a bus or a train. We see life outside continuing as normal, as if nothing is the matter, but the implication is that we share the point of view of the Jews being transported away from this “normality” that is oblivious to them.

This is confirmed when we get an insert showing the inside of a windowless train compartment meant for cargo, but we see a group of people, some dressed in striped pyjamas. The two nameless young men are seated in a corner at the far back. They devour the corn they had snuck in and put on the shoes they had hidden in their jackets. But this is the past from which they had just managed to break free. Or is it? The story unspools in such a fragmented manner that the pieces ultimately fit together so loosely that the big picture escapes us. There is even room for an (admittedly slightly contrived) reading of the ending as a prelude to the opening.

Diamonds of the Night is at its best during those brief moments, created via the inserts, that give us a vivid sense of the fear and confusion inside the mind of the younger man (Kumbera). A few shots, brilliantly captured by director of photography Jaroslav Kučera (who would become one of the most prominent cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave), show tall trees being felled and falling almost straight onto the camera. In another famous composition, ants crawl over an anonymous (either remembered or imagined) young man’s feet, hands and face. And in one of the most action-packed scenes, when he goes to a farmhouse to beg for bread, he imagines himself, over and over again, killing his well-doer out of concern that she will surrender him to the authorities.

But many might view all these interruptions as little more than impressionist smudges on a threadbare storyline, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. In particular, there are too many flashbacks (albeit distorted or misremembered, as made clear by the KL coat that Kumbera’s character is already wearing) to brighter days, and they do not appear to contribute substantially to our understanding of the characters or their backgrounds.

The last part of the film is the most interesting because of the tension it evokes through a very simple approach: repetition and little alteration. Having been captured by a group of dimwitted Kraut fogies, members of the so-called Volkssturm militia, the two men are made to stand with their hands in the air and face a blank wall. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, the old Germans merrily gorge themselves on chicken and drink pints of beer. Every so often, there is a cut back to the two men, immobile with fear. This alternation between the two shots, as well as the contrast between the silence and the yack-yack-yacking, creates incredible tension.

But while the film gives an atypical insight into the mind of one of its two central characters, the other (Janský) remains an enigma. Towards the end of the film, an apparent flashback even seems to suggest the possibility that he never made it past the opening scene. And as potent as some of the images are, there are just as many shots whose meaning is not immediately evident or are needlessly repeated. 

Diamonds of the Night is a film of contrasts. It uses an experimental approach to conjure up a world of mental imagery that doesn’t always connect with the viewer. And yet, we do get a glimpse of the main character’s inner struggle to make sense of the senselessness around him.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

André Crous

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring involves the rape of a virgin in medieval Sweden and questions the meaning of God’s (initial) silence when her father takes revenge.

Virgin SpringSweden
4*

Director:
Ingmar Bergman
Screenwriter:
Ulla Isaksson
Director of Photography:
Sven Nykvist

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Jungfrukällan

Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring opens with fire and closes with water. We expect a baby to be born, but instead, a virgin is raped and dies. We are reminded of God around every corner, but his apparent absence rings just as loudly. It is up to the viewer to decide whether to interpret these opposites as proof of balance or as markers of a fundamentally unpredictable existence.

Following on the heels of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, two of Bergman’s best-known films, Virgin Spring is less visual but equally interested in pressing questions related to mortality. In the opening scene, set in medieval Sweden, we see a wild-eyed servant girl, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), quietly beseech the god Odin to come to her aid. The evening before, she witnessed her master’s teenage daughter, the pale-skinned, blond-haired, ever-smiling and pure-as-snow Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), dance with many young men, and she envies the attention the girl received from everyone. We later learn that she is asking Odin to put a stop to all this, failing to realise that the answer may not look very pretty.

Karin, a single child whose strong bond with her well-to-do parents is emphasised from the beginning, is sent to deliver candles to a church. The candles need to be delivered by a virgin, and Karin fits the bill. She even wears a special dress sewn by 15 “maidens”. For her own safety, she is accompanied by Ingeri, who is not very keen on talking to her, but during a conversation along the way, Karin tells her “no man will get me to bed without marriage”. Rather ominously, Ingeri suggests it might not always be her choice to make, but they continue onwards through the forest before Karin can consider the implication.

In the first half of the film, which culminates in the shocking rape and murder of Karin at the hands of a trio of vagrant brothers, there is a very strong focus on the two very different women. Karin knows nothing of the evil in the world, but perhaps because she is killed, she elicits some empathy from the viewer. We almost forgive her her ignorance because she passes away after a vicious assault.

By contrast, Ingeri seems to be slightly more world-wise and suspicious of men’s intentions. But she also reveals herself to be just as weak as Karin. At many turns, she becomes positively hysterical when overcome by fear or guilt or uncertainty, which makes her look all the worse. This film seems to imply that women are passive victims, while men are either malicious or vengeful.

But it is the rape scene that defines the film. Although mild in comparison with films of subsequent years, the act itself offers a few excruciating seconds of indirect assault, as the camera is positioned next to Karin’s face while she is being violated. While it only lasts a moment, and Bergman quickly reneges by going for a long shot that shows the full assault, this initial approach is stunningly effective and shows the “less is more” adage in action.

With the actions of the three goat herders that lead to Karin’s death, the focus turns to the male characters. By a stroke of pure bad luck for them, the malicious trio subsequently turns up at the estate of the late daughter’s parents, seeking food and shelter for the night and offering her 15-maiden-woven dress for sale – the same one she was wearing when they killed her. The youngest among them realises too late their fate is sealed and his petrified silence leads to their own deaths.

But the prospect of death hangs over the entire narrative. At the very outset, Frida, the housekeeper, mentions she nearly stepped on two dozen little chicks at night. She picks one up and says, “You poor thing, live out your wretched little life the way God allows all of us to live.”

Much later, when Ingeri has an awkward conversation with a man living in the forest, he shows her a few rudimentary implements that we quickly realise are to be used for an abortion: “Here is a cure for your anguish. Here is a cure for your woe. Blood, course no more. Fish, stop still in the brook.” To emphasise this point, he grabs her by the groin, but she manages to flee the scene.

The film’s interest in Odin, perhaps the best-known deity from Norse mythology, is tied to two rather debauched characters: the hysterical, irrational Ingeri and the aforementioned perverted man in the forest. By contrast, The Virgin Spring associates the god of Christianity with slightly more rational impulses. Even when Karin’s father, Töre (Max von Sydow), takes murderous revenge for his late daughter’s death, he does so after felling a birch tree and taking a sauna. This is not impulse but considered action.

In the film’s final scene, Töre lifts his hands to the heavens and delivers a prayer in which he looks up towards the Sun and questions why God saw his daughter’s rape but did nothing, why he saw Töre kill the three men but did nothing. “You allowed it to happen”, he seethes.

Of course, what he gets in response is more nothingness. Just like God failed to listen to him when he prayed to his crucified son the previous morning and asked that he “guard us this day and always from the devil’s snares. Lord, let not temptation, shame nor danger befall thy servants this day.” Like so many other believers in the centuries to follow, Töre decides that God requires penance for others’ sins but does not have to justify his own actions (or, more accurately, his passiveness when evil happens). Töre resolves that his “sin”, namely that he killed those responsible for Karin’s tragic death on Earth, will be sufficiently washed away by him building a church in honour of this god of his.

But then, something miraculous happens. When Töre and his wife, Mätare, move Karin’s body, water bubbles up from where her head had lain. Ingari washes her face, presumably to wash away her previous belief in Norse gods and all of her sins committed under the label of paganism. She appears to be happy for the very first time. And for a moment, all we can hear is the flow of the water, the symbol of life, even as the very dead body of Karin is draped in her parents’ arms.

The Virgin Spring does not have the visual inventiveness nor the intellectual force of many of Bergman’s other contemplations on religion and existence, but its simple plot is stripped of excess and easy to follow. It lacks real depth and eschews any serious probing of the issues it raises, but the final deus ex aqua moment shows a director open to making the presence of the extraordinary felt.