Back in October 2010, I opened my essay on The Seventh Seal for this blog with an anecdote about a co-worker who recommended both that film and Winter Light, the one I'm about to review. Though The Seventh Seal was the first of those two films I was able to find and watch back in the early 2000s (as a rental from my local library and, eventually, one of the first Criterion DVDs I ever bought), I was able to borrow a copy of Winter Light fairly soon afterward. Much of what had so thoroughly impressed me about The Seventh Seal was remarkably absent in Winter Light, so I thought after my first, troubling viewing of the film. Certainly, the handling of serious theological questions linked the two together, but whereas the earlier film seemed to invite me in with a fascinating mix of foreboding allegorical symbolism, existential dread and surprisingly earthy humor (not expected due to Bergman's "serious" reputation), Winter Light seemed, to my naive, under-developed cinematic palate at the time anyway, to willfully push me away with its cast of unlikable characters, claustrophobic (though nicely photographed) interiors and an unsettling lack of resolution to all the moral and spiritual dilemmas it served up: an extinguished will to live in response to the threat of nuclear annihilation; the inadequacy of spiritual consolations to meet the needs of modern humanity; the loss of community and empathetic concern for others as signified by a decline in church attendance; the emotionally stunted response to a suicidal death that is at once both regrettable and pitifully meaningless. Compared to Pastor Tomas Ericsson's declarative but ambiguous final pronouncement from the altar, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory," The Seventh Seal's famous Dance of Death outro was a joyful, crowd-pleasing curtain call.
What surprised me the most about Winter Light was that it was recommended by a man who was in the process of completing his seminary education, a guy a few years older than me who had left his job in some kind of for-profit business in order to answer what he considered a divine calling. That was the reason he was working in social services, as an on-call employee at the residential treatment program I supervised at the time. We had somehow gotten on to the topic of religion in movies, and he mentioned Bergman, and those two specific titles, as top-notch treatments of contemporary spirituality. Given the bleakness and disappointment experienced by Pastor Ericsson after years in the ministry, it didn't make sense to me at the time that someone just beginning his entry into that profession would look to this film for inspiration. With its uncompromising erosion of dogmatic certainty and apparent expose of the hollowness of tradition and ritual, wouldn't it rather be seen as a warning that calls into question his goal, even his motivation?! Maybe watching Winter Light served as a kind of gut-check for those who aspire to be members of the religious establishment, to make sure they're not getting into it for the wrong reasons, such as Tomas' fateful decision decades earlier to become a clergyman in order to please his parents...
Well, that was my first take on the film, and it stuck with me mostly intact over the subsequent years until I revisited it for this review, now much more informed on Bergman's career and personal history. Over the past week, after watching Winter Light through a few more times and considering a variety of perspectives on the messages it seeks to deliver, I find myself a lot less interested in the specifically theological crisis that Tomas (and by extension, his spurned ex-lover Marta) endures. That dilemma is capably addressed and at least potentially resolved in a wider variety of ways in the real world (or at least, in our contemporary society with its multiple options regarding spirituality) than the binary choice of faith/no-faith that's sketched out in the dialog between the trembling skepticism emerging in Tomas and Marta's settled atheistic humanism in search of an interpersonal connection that can serve as her life's mission. Now, rather than see the disgraced pastor (understandably still traumatized by the tragic loss of his wife in her youth just four years earlier) as a compelling proof-text for the inevitable cynical hypocrisy that underlies the benevolent facade of professional religiosity, I regard him mostly as just one variant on the wide spectrum of mid-life crises so common to men of a certain age, who like Tomas embarked on young adulthood confident that they'd make their mark on the world, only to realize that their chosen path (whatever it was) failed to deliver in fulfilling the idealistic promises they projected onto it. Of course, when one's profession speaks authoritatively about God, truth and life's ultimate purpose, that raises the stakes significantly. But Tomas wrestles with more or less the same kind of tensions that just about anyone unfortunate enough to reach his station in life (that is to say, moderately comfortable and prosperous, but carrying the burden of heartache and deep disappointment) will have to face.
Unfortunately, given the responsibility that comes with working as an intermediary between God and the rest of humanity, when Tomas fails to carry out his assignment with the right balance of wisdom, compassion and humility, the consequences can be quite severe, as we see in the aftermath of his miserable counseling session with the suicidal Jonas Persson. As one who's done my own share of counseling over the years, I was appalled at the frailty of Pastor Ericsson's effort. He lapses into talking excessively about himself so hastily that at first I was a bit incredulous - has this guy never had any kind of training in how to practice good listening skills or draw out an introvert? But then I realized that Tomas was simply too far gone in his illness of body and soul to catch himself and realize the mistakes he was making. Or another way of putting it: Jonas had the misfortune of being referred to someone who was just a shade less intentional about snuffing himself than he was. We see the pastor commit a form of spiritual suicide, in confessing his lack of faith and the essential dishonesty of his clerical pose, to a man ill-equipped to withstand the pressure of seeing the truth displayed with such rawness. And so Pastor Ericsson becomes an accessory to the act of self-induced homicide that Jonas commits within a few minutes after leaving the church in dismay. But there are no other fingerprints on the murder weapon other than those of the pathetic fisherman, an early victim of media fear-mongering who has millions of spiritual kinfolk living in our society today, most of whom live in similar terror of apocalyptic specters but lack Jonas' resolve to escape this world at a time and place of his own choosing.
Of all the disturbing conundrums faced by the small cast of characters in Winter Light, probably the saddest, because it's the most easily avoided and readily solvable, is the rupture that exists between Tomas and Mara. Gunnar Bjornstrom and Ingrid Thulin both give remarkable life to these characters, who are each constrained by their native temperament and their respective emotional hang-ups that afflict them so mercilessly. Yet despite their deep-seated Scandinavian inhibitions, their reluctance to give full vent to the confusion and resentments that have them so blocked off from each other, they both finally reach the moment where they can't hold in what needs to be said. For Marta, it's a long, hand-written confessional letter, read on camera with Thulin's plaintive face and inky pupils searing her words and image into our consciousness. In it, she lays bare her desperate need to show Tomas her love for him, as it's now become the main focus of her existence. How indelibly sad that she's been drawn to a man whose reasons for rejecting her are expressed with such definitive finality, and yet who cannot help but ask her to continue tagging along anyway, just in case something happens in the next few days or minutes to cause him to change his mind.
Though the scope and scale of Winter Light are more tightly drawn and sparsely whittled down than probably anything else produced within the Bergman canon (and 99% of all other movies ever made, while I'm at it), it's that very discipline, that ultra-refined focus, that led the director, along with a significant number of his fans and followers, to regard this as the most perfectly realized of his films. I'm not one to lay on hyperbole and superlatives simply for effect, and there are probably at least a half-dozen other Bergman films that I would recommend most viewers watch before I steer them toward Winter Light, if only because I think this film may feed into some stereotypes that don't serve him well in confirming some negative biases toward his work. Make your way through his great masterpieces of the 1950s - The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, The Magician, Smiles of a Summer Night, even the emerging genius of his early works like Sawdust and Tinsel or Summer With Monika, as well as the first film in this "Silence of God" trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly - if only to get a fuller appreciation of Bergman's humane warmth and humor (along with a little more atmospheric fresh air.) With those tastes more fully acquired, you'll be better able to appreciate the bracing shivers induced by the oblique distillation of Winter Light.
Next: Le Doulos