Tag: Swedish Films

The Swedish Model: a shallow and unedifying view of Sweden’s no-lockdown COVID-19 strategy

“The Swedish Model” (Foreign Correspondent, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 June 2020)

In March 2020, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus had already been circulating in Europe for at least two months already, most countries there adopted lock-down of varying degrees of severity – with some countries such as Spain adopting such an extreme version that even young children were not allowed outside the places where they lived – yet Sweden opted to follow an approach in which such measures as social distancing and appropriate hand hygiene would be recommended rather than ordered on pain of punishment or penalties. Restaurants, pubs and cafes would still remain open, provided social distancing was practised; schools would remain open; and people would be more or less free to continue with normal activities. The Swedish government’s aim was to limit the spread of the coronavirus infection in the country without overburdening the Swedish healthcare system. Since adopting the no-lockdown policy, Sweden’s infection rate and mortality rate compared with several other European countries have been high, and the general global consensus is that these high rates of infection and death are the result of the no-lockdown policy.

Researched by Lisa Millar, who also provides voice-over narration in parts, this episode of “Foreign Correspondent” takes a similar view, that Sweden’s relaxed no-lockdown policy is in part responsible for the high toll the disease has taken among the more vulnerable groups in society, in particular the elderly in aged care facilities and refugees and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. A large part of the film involves following different stories of individuals: a director of an aged care home with 350 patients; a Syrian Christian activist; a university professor opposed to the no-lockdown policy who sets up a testing centre in an immigrant neighbourhood in Stockholm; and finally Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who breezily tells his interviewers that Sweden is doing the right thing in striving to achieve herd immunity as he goes about giving speeches and reassuring people that the country is on the right track. He admits that Sweden has neglected its elderly and immigrant groups but takes no personal or other responsibility for the Swedish government’s oversight as he continues on his merry way.

In covering personal stories, the film provides no analysis of why the elderly and the immigrant community bear the brunt of the pandemic that has hit the country hard. Millar tells us that the vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 deaths are of people aged 70+ years, and with most of these people also in aged care institutions, they are unlikely to benefit from lockdown conditions. Indeed, in many countries that do have lockdown, the numbers of people in aged care places suffering and dying from COVID-19 are out of proportion compared to younger age groups and in some countries the median age of death from COVID-19 is in the late 40s. Had Millar stepped back from emphasising personal stories (which, while tragic in their own ways, do not tell viewers much about the nature of the disease as it affects Swedish society), and investigated the character of aged care institutions in Sweden, compared to their equivalents in, say, Denmark or Norway, she might have found something very disturbing: Sweden’s aged care institutions are the responsibility of municipal and regional governments, which have outsourced their management to private companies. Privatisation has led to these facilities housing several hundred patients, cared for by workers on contracts on low pay and working in sometimes quite appalling conditions. To scrape together an income they can survive on, many workers work at more than one facility.

The low income and lousy working conditions in aged care homes mean that such work attracts people who can find little other work in Sweden: these people turn out to be the very refugees and immigrants who themselves have been hit hard by the disease. On top of this, these groups often live in areas designated no-go zones by police, due to gang warfare and high rates of crime, and this means that government offices providing social services (and information about COVID-19 and how to avoid it or minimise its spread) in the languages of the refugee and immigrant communities are scarce in their localities. Refugees and immigrants frequently live in very crowded and unhealthy housing, with three generations in the one residence, and aged care workers coming home from working shifts at one or more places might spread the disease and infect their older relatives even if they themselves are asymptomatic.

In general, Sweden’s poor experience in dealing with COVID-19, and in failing to protect its most vulnerable citizens, is a consequence of decades of governments privatising what should be publicly funded and resourced institutions, subject to public accountability, and ignoring the needs of marginal groups in society and the discrimination and barriers that impede their socio-economic advancement. That “Foreign Correspondent” completely missed analysing the broader context which might have enabled it to find the link between the high infection and mortality rates between two groups of vulnerable people (the aged, and the refugees / immigrants from poor countries) but preferred to wring out weepy and emotional stories to attract viewer attention reflects very poorly on the program and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Australian viewers expect a higher and deeper standard of coverage of national and global issues at the ABC and to see this institution adopting practices associated with trashy commercial television programs purporting to feature political or current affairs issues and analysis is indeed grave and tragic.

Aniara: a disappointing critique of human society in a spaceship on a doomed voyage

Pella Kagerman, Hugo Lilja, “Aniara” (2018)

An ambitious project to bring a poem by the Swedish poet / author / former sailor Harry Martinson (who co-won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1974) to the big screen, “Aniara” tells the tale of a spaceship transporting colonists from a future Earth ravaged by the effects of climate change and environmental destruction to Mars where new homes billed as a Promised Land are waiting for them. Just as you’d expect though, a bit of space junk from some long-forgotten satellite or previous space journey hits the ship and sends it off-course into the deeper recesses of space. To make matters worse, the crew has had to eject the ship’s nuclear-powered fuel reserves to avoid an even worse catastrophe. From then on, Aniara sails farther and farther towards the outermost limits of the cosmos in a vain attempt to find a planet whose gravitational pull can be used by the crew to manoeuvre the ship around and send it back to Earth or to Mars.

In the meantime, while the crew hope to find this planet, a ship employee known as Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson), hereafter MR, has been tasked with looking after the passengers’ psychological health by operating a giant machine called Mima which can read people’s thoughts and draw on their memories and dreams to create virtual reality worlds in which their owners can participate. For a few weeks, Mima operates perfectly but after the accident, more and more people want to use Mima as a form of escape from the frustrations of waiting for help or rescue or good news from the Aniara crew, and Mima eventually breaks down completely from the overload of painful memories and nightmares. MR is blamed for Mima’s breakdown and is briefly imprisoned, along with one of the crew, navigator Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), but both women are released a year or so later. By then, they have formed a couple and get to share accommodation.

As the weeks roll into months and the months roll into years, in spite of constant reassurances by Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) that all is well, people’s hopes turn into despair and the glittering consumerist society on Aniara – it is outfitted like a giant passenger cruise liner – breaks down. In various chapters that take place during the ship’s lifetime, people turn to religious cults for guidance and reason for living; some of these cults seem to be no more than excuses for sexual orgies. Isagel becomes pregnant in one such orgy and gives birth to a boy. While the child gives hope to both MR and Isagel, Isagel later becomes depressed at the thought that the child will live his entire life in an artificial environment; viewers can tell 10 parsecs away what tragedy will befall both Isagel and the baby.

MR spends her time teaching esoteric space mathematics to child and teenage passengers in the hope that some of them will learn enough to become part of the Aniara crew. In her spare time, she tries to cheer up Isagel and help bring up the baby, assist the crew where needed and rework part of Mima to create a beam screen of natural Earth landscapes around the ship for passengers to view.

By necessity, the narrative is broken up into chapters that provide snapshots of the gradual deterioration of human society on board the ship, as crew and passenger expectations of a quick, easy and luxurious trip turn into despair and despondency, leading to violence, the proliferation of religious cults, substance abuse and addiction, and suicide. At the same time, due to the episodic nature of the narrative, there is no indication in the film of people gradually overcoming their differences and forming associations to help one another across the class divide or the crew hierarchy, in spite of Captain Chefone’s increasingly despotic and irrational behaviour. Directors Kagerman and Lilja are clearly no believers in people’s ability to overcome lifetimes of imbibing capitalist and consumerist values and ideologies. Unfortunately the film does a poor job as a study of trauma, due in part to its structure: no reason is given as to why so many people form cults or try to kill themselves – it’s as if the directors have assumed such behaviours are inevitable and always follow in a closed environment of extreme need where there is no hope of rescue, so viewers are expected to go along with such plot stereotypes. The result is a very shallow movie.

Character development remains at a woeful level of superficiality and the romance between MR and Isagel doesn’t quite come off as genuine, but as a sop to identity politics. The conflict between MR and the increasingly capricious and incompetent captain seems equally shallow, and MR’s astronomer friend (Anneli Martini) who foresees the ship’s doom is wasted as a character. There should have been plenty of room in the narrative for panics arising from food shortages or a breakdown in some essential item (such as the water supply or the electricity) but strangely the film-makers opted to miss opportunities for testing character and people making decisions that could spell life or death for the whole population and which point to future directions for society on board to develop towards. Can people overcome despair and lack to find comfort in their own imaginations, resources and one another, and combine to create a new co-operative society with better leadership and better decision-making abilities? The film suggests not.

In all, while the cinematography, design and the special effects were very good, much of the science behind “Aniara” is quite dodgy – there is no explanation as to where water for washing sheets and clothes comes from, and in a future where ships routinely take people back and forth between Earth and Mars, surely a technology for cleaning things that does away with water would be more credible – and the sociology is riddled with cheap stereotyping. There is no attempt to explore and criticise capitalism and social hierarchy in the film even though capitalism provides the context in which the Aniara ship sails on its doomed voyage: people did have to pay to board the ship and enjoy its luxuries, and MR was expected as an employee to provide a service passengers had already paid for. The film is a great disappointment.

The Wife: a solid film notable for its lead performances but little else

Bjorn Runge, “The Wife” (2017)

As films go, “The Wife” is enjoyable mainly for Glenn Close’s understated performance as the title character: for the most part, the plot is predictable and Runge’s direction is solid if lacking in flair. It’s best seen as a character study of a woman who had aspirations to be a writer and who ends up repressing her ambitions to support her husband’s writing career. Literary giant Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature so he and his wife Joan (Close) prepare to journey to Stockholm to receive the award. Taking their son David (Max Irons), himself an aspiring writer, with them, the Castlemans are accosted on the plane by Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), a creepy freelance writer who plans to pen a tell-all biography about Joseph. Finally in Stockholm, the couple and their son settle down in their hotel rooms, and from here on the Castleman marriage starts to shake as the significance of the prize, her husband’s reaction and his cantankerous behaviour towards Bone and Max, and the general fawning over Joseph (with herself being relegated to the background as the dutiful and supportive wife) gradually begin weigh heavily on Joan.

Two chance utterances between Joseph and Joan in front of David alert viewers to the possibility that perhaps Joseph’s writing over the decades hasn’t entirely been his own. While the Castlemans perform the round of parties and meet-and-greet rituals leading up to the prize-giving ceremonies, Bone gathers enough information (including talking to Joan and Max separately) to come to the same conclusion. Flashbacks to when a young Joan (Annie Starke) first met Joseph (Harry Lloyd) as a student enrolled in his creative writing classes at college in the 1950s, leading to their becoming secret lovers while Joseph is still married to his first wife, and then to early life together struggling to make ends meet (Joseph having divorced his wife and left college to pursue writing full-time), fill in the details of that particular plot strand.

Close gives a master class in minimalist acting with her eyes and expressions that hint at the emotional turmoil and suffering within. Pryce is an excellent foil with his cantankerous and crude behaviour that includes chasing a woman photographer young enough to be his daughter. Slater plays Bone a little too smoothly; he seems comfortable as an oily, sleazy opportunist, and in the role offers little else. The rest of the cast is as wallpaper.

Apart from Close and Pryce’s acting, the film doesn’t offer much beyond demonstrating how a young female writer, shy and unsure of her talent, is deterred from following her dreams by an embittered female author (Elizabeth McGovern), her teacher / lover / husband’s own self-centred immaturity, lack of insight and arrogance, and the prevailing misogynist attitudes of the literary publishing industry in the 1950s. As time passes by, and her husband’s literary star begins its rise, Joan finds herself locked into supporting his career and becomes resigned to her role. The film only really perks up at the very end when Joan tells Bone what he can and can’t do, and one realises that, for all Joan supposedly suffered over the years as The Wife, her relationship with Joseph really was symbiotic and a purely stereotypical feminist explanation of their marriage as one where one party benefited at the expense of a long-suffering other and reaps all the rewards will not do.

The film could have offered some criticism, even light criticism, of the Nobel Prize and how this institution and the awarding of literary prizes can distort writers’ ambitions and affect their reputations. Too much weight can be attached to a writer’s reputation based on what prizes s/he has won without consideration for whether literary writing itself has become nothing more than a mere genre with its own load of stereotypes living in a bubble that is divorced from reality and with nothing valuable to say to most people struggling under political, economic and social systems that have become increasingly repressive, unequal, corrupt and inhuman.

The Virgin Spring: a profound and moving work on vengeance, justice and the remoteness of religion

Ingmar Bergman, “The Virgin Spring / Jungfrukällan” (1960)

Perhaps not so celebrated as “The Seventh Seal”, this morality tale on the nature of humanity, the remoteness of religion and the anguish of human existence is nevertheless powerful in its apparent simplicity. In 14th-century rural Sweden, a wealthy landowner Töre (Max von Sydow) and his wife Märeta (Birgitta Valberg), both devout Christians, farewell their daughter Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) on her long trip to deliver candles to a local church. With her is her pregnant foster sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), treated by their mother as a servant as punishment for having a child out of wedlock. Karin and Ingeri’s trip is long and takes them through remote country, and it’s not long before the two young women are separated and Karin meets a dreadful fate at the hands of two impoverished goat-herders attracted to her innocence, generosity and, above all, her rich clothes. Later the goat-herders, together with their mute young brother, seek shelter at Töre and Märeta’s farm where they try to sell the clothes they have taken off Karin. The parents recognise the clothes as Karin’s, and what follows next, as the parents are torn between their Christian faith, with its admonition to forgive sin and to have mercy, and their desire for vengeance against those who have harmed their only child, can only be described as appalling.

Threaded throughout the film is a constant war between Christianity and paganism: early on, Ingeri invokes the god Odin to harm Karin, the favoured and spoilt child, and pops a toad into Karin’s lunch before it is packed into the saddle-bags for the journey. The religious overtones throughout the film are strong to the extent that the whole work groans with the burden. It’s not hard to see that the various characters represent the so-called Seven Deadly Sins: Karin is guilty of sloth, her mother of pride, Ingeri of envy, Töre of anger and the goat-herders of lust, gluttony and greed. Another sin that might be added here is excess: Töre’s rage is so overwhelming that he ends up killing a child who is guilty only by association with the goat-herders. The pagan aspects of the film and their association with life and death are portrayed in the use of fire, earth and water throughout: fire gives life and warmth but can also kill; trees grow from the earth but earth can also smother; and water as used in the film symbolises new life but can also be used in rituals that prepare one for murder. During the girls’ trip, Ingeri meets a sinister old gentleman who might be Odin made manifest: he is one-eyed, he has a pet raven and he lives in a strange wooden house (representing Yggdrasil, where Odin hanged himself?) where water (Odin’s blood?) is continuously pouring through the walls and flooding the floors. The Christian aspect is also strong: Karin’s role as sacrificial lamb is obvious and even the goats that gambol about have symbolic value (as bearers of sin).

Ambiguity is also a constant through the film and none of the characters comes off as admirable in any way. Perhaps the most outstanding character is that of Märeta: initially steadfast in her Christian faith to the extent of burning stigmata into her wrists, the woman lavishes love on Karin, yet when her faith is tested, she becomes a calculating bitch – the scene in which she accepts the clothes from the goat-herders, recognises the clothes and tells the men she’ll find out what her husband is prepared to pay is cold and chilling, and what follows after when she collapses on the door-step and hugs the torn rags is equally heart-wrenching – and all but urges her husband to avenge Karin’s rape and death. This is a splendid piece of acting, notable for its emotional restraint. Von Sydow’s Töre is no less riveting for his near-manic desire for vengeance, his terrible violence and his anguish when, as a result of what he has done, he finds no relief in murder and vengeance, begs God for forgiveness and tries to bargain with God by promising that he will build a church on the site of Karin’s death. His Christian faith, shaky to begin with, cannot help him; his wife’s faith, also severely tested, cannot help either. The couple find themselves in a dreadful existential dilemma in which vengeance has proved to be a hollow comfort. Karin may be spoilt but her innocence, bordering on gullibility and sheer idiocy, is touching and her rape and death are unbearable to watch for their overwhelming pathos. The goat-herders may be repellent but viewers may feel some pity for their poverty, circumstances and unthinking stupidity which have driven them to greed, rape and murder.

The tone of the film is bleak and viewers are left in no doubt about the hardships that people in mediaeval rural Sweden had to suffer in making a living. The film’s coda looks tacked on as an afterthought and its meaning is unclear: does the spring that bubbles up under Karin represent the triumph of paganism over Christianity, or is it a sign of forgiveness or otherwise from God in answer to Töre’s outburst? The spring can symbolise the rebirth and renewal of life and hope. The film’s cinematography is beautiful and simple yet powerful, with a strong focus on close-ups of actors’ faces and the expressions on them, and it is no surprise to learn that the cinematographer for this film, Sven Nykvist, became director Bergman’s go-to camera man for all of his later films.

The film’s plot might stretch plausibility but overall this is a profound and highly emotional work.

Fanny and Alexander: a film of many personas revisiting familiar Bergman themes

Ingmar Bergman, “Fanny and Alexander” (1982)

In part an autobiographical film based on his own childhood experiences of growing up with a severe Lutheran pastor father, “Fanny and Alexander” was Ingmar Bergman’s last major film and is a celebration of family and its continuity, and an affirmation of life and rebirth. The film under review is the 188-minute theatrical version and splits into three parts. The first part which takes up the first 90 minutes brings together the Ekdahl family members at their matriarch’s mansion for Christmas dinner in 1907. The Ekdahls are a theatrical family whose scion, Oskar (Allan Edwall), runs a drama company. Besides Grandma and Oskar, the family includes Uncle Gustav who carries on a secret affair with a young maid with his wife’s tacit acceptance, and Oskar’s wife Emilie (Ewa Froling) and their two children Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). Through the way they celebrate Christmas, the Ekdahls are shown as lively and exuberant people who enjoy life and its luxuries, live for the moment and who are rather at a loss at dealing with the real world. Oskar worries about the debts his theatre company is accumulating and this concern puts a strain on his health. Grandma is having a secret affair with the family’s banker (Joseph Erlandsson) and seems unconcerned that the domestic staff are aware of it.

Although the film usually takes a third-person view of events, it generally revolves around the boy Alexander, a highly imaginative lad who enjoys showing his sister and cousins moving pictures on a kaleidoscope-like contraption. The boy is sensitive and becomes aware early on that his father’s days might be numbered. Sure enough Oskar falls ill and deteriorates rapidly. Emilie is devastated by Oskar’s death and finds coping without him difficult; she is drawn to the bishop Vergerus (Jan Malmsjo) for comfort and eventually agrees to marry him. After the wedding, Vergerus brings her and the two children to his home to live with his relatives in what becomes the second part of the film. Viewers will guess very quickly that Alexander and his step-father won’t be the best of friends as Vergerus imposes a severe regime on his new family and Alexander chafes not only at the physical restrictions but also the restrictions on his thinking and imagination. The two clash and Emilie begins to regret the haste with which she married Vergerus but she is pregnant with his child and Swedish law in the early 1900s did not favour women who divorced their husbands.

The film’s style ranges from lavish to minimal in a calm and understated way that one associates with Scandinavian film-making. Sven Nykvist’s cinematography is rich and beautiful and is one of the film’s major highlights. The actors fulfill their roles admirably whether they play main characters or supporting roles. Though the plot may be a simple and hackneyed Cinderella-style piece with an unbelievably happy ending, Bergman uses the three-part narrative not only to express the themes and ideas that have been dear to him throughout his directing career but also to underline his career and the people who have worked with him. The Ekdahls represent the family he would have liked to have had as a child and also the actors and technical crew Bergman relied on over the years of his career on stage and in film; Bishop Vergerus’ family on the other hand represents Bergman’s birth family.

The film can be slow and very understated. Viewers should rewatch it at least once to pick up and understand fully Bergman’s concerns with the life cycle and the fears of those facing the Grim Reaper sooner rather than later. As always in Bergman’s films, the plight of women in a society where the dice are loaded against them is of concern. The maid seduced by one of the Ekdahl men falls pregnant: in real life in Sweden at the dawn of the 20th century, she would have been turfed out from the Ekdahl household and either forced to put up the child for adoption or driven to live in the poorhouse with the baby.

Magic realist / gothic horror elements come thick and fast in the film’s second half and are associated with Alexander’s contact with his grandmother’s Jewish banker friend whose nephews run a puppet-making business and help the banker rescue Alexander and his sister on their grandmother’s behalf. The boy meets Ishmael (Stina Ekblad) who tells Alexander that his fantasies about his step-father’s death can come true as he visualises them; in eerie parallel, the bishop dies in a mysterious house fire. It would seem that with the Vergerus family out of their lives, Emilie and her children are finally reconciled with their Ekdahl relatives, and everyone can live happily ever after, but Alexander receives an unexpected visit from the bishop’s ghost who vows to give the boy a hard time from that moment on.

Bergman enthusiasts will find that “Fanny and Alexander” revisits familiar themes and aspects of the Swedish director’s past oeuvre: the film attacks the hypocrisy of institutional religion and social traditions that weigh heavily against mothers and their children; the film examines the different roles people play throughout their lives as they travel through the life cycle, and how role play reveals their inner characters; and it opposes Alexander and what he represents against Vergerus who, though a religious man, represents aspects of the restriction of life and nature, and ultimately of death. One can imagine Alexander constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadows that will follow him for the rest of his life; whether he can live his life in spite of Vergerus’ haunting or end up succumbing to the malign influence is left with the viewer as the film closes.

While the full 300-minute TV film would have cleared up the loose ends of the shorter film – there are many such loose ends and the fall-out between Vergerus and Emilie doesn’t seem quite convincing – as it is , the movie is very self-contained and its circular narrative is delineated very gracefully. The children are reunited with their family but they are not as innocent of the ways of the world as they were previously and there is a burden that Alexander must suffer in silence. The film has a low-key and graceful way of telling its dialogue-driven story – even the fire and the bishop’s demise are not nearly as startling as they could have been, thanks to the way the incidents are portrayed as report by a police officer – and this matter-of-fact style allows Bergman to explore the themes that were always important to him throughout his career. Admittedly the film is hokey in parts yet the silly bits co-exist well with scenes of horror in what turns out to be a work of many … well, personas itself: family drama, comedy, magic realism, gothic horror … it’s got it all.

The Seventh Seal: examining a man’s crisis of faith and his quest for meaning to his existence

Ingmar Bergman, “The Seventh Seal / Det Sjunde Inseglet” (1957)

Set in Sweden during the Black Death (1347 – 1350), this famous film examines a man’s crisis of faith and his personal quest for meaning to life and a reason to go on living when around him suffering, violence and death can strike suddenly, randomly and senselessly. The film is also a criticism of formal religion, the beliefs its priests or their equivalents proclaim and more or less coerce their flocks to follow, and how formal belief systems and ideologies can collapse so quickly after a major disaster like a disease epidemic. Having returned from the Crusades, the knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is on his way home with his squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand) when he meets Death (Bengt Ekerot) on a beach. Block challenges Death to a chess game: if he can keep the game going by fair means or foul, he can earn extra time to find God and a meaning to his existence. Death, kept busy by plague victims dropping like flies, and not a little proud of his prowess as chess grandmaster, agrees to the challenge. Block successfully plays Death to check, and Death allows him respite.

During this period, Block and Jons meet several characters who attach themselves to the pair who promise to save them from the plague. Block meets a young family of actors and troubadours, Jof (Nils Poppe) who has visions, Mia (Bib Andersson) who cares for their baby son Mikael, and their manager Skat. Jons rescues a young woman from her would-be rapist whom Jons recognises as theologian Raval who, ten years earlier, had urged him and Block to join the crusade to the Holy Land. Jons’ disgust at seeing Raval suggests that he believes Raval to be a charlatan and liar for having sent knights on what turned out to be a futile and unnecessary quest of suffering and sacrifice. Later, Jons also saves Jof from Raval’s vicious behaviour and wounds the theologian. Skat has a fling with a blacksmith’s wife Lisa but she ends the affair and returns to her husband. Meanwhile Death pursues all of them.

The historical setting is not intended to be accurate, it is a metaphor and allegory, and all the characters are symbolic. The young family represents Joseph, Mary and the child Jesus: the embodiment of hope. Block is the man on a quest and Jons is his cynical atheist shadow. Raval represents the hypocrisy of religion. Other minor characters such as a girl (Maud Hansson) condemned to death for suspected witchcraft perhaps represent fear, ignorance and superstitious belief, and their tragic consequences. The acting ranges from fair to good to the often hammy, depending on the scene as the film features comedy, tragedy and melodrama in equal measures, but the major actors at least give their best to their roles.

Although Block cannot save himself and not all his questions are answered to his satisfaction, he does make good use of the time he gains by saving the young family from Death’s clutches and comforting the accused witch in the last moments of her life. In this act of gratitude for their hospitality, Block perhaps discovers the meaning of life and existence: our existence will have meaning only through our actions towards one another and to all other actors in our environment. Through his actions, Block expresses the compassion of God, a silent presence in much of the film (and to which the film’s title is an oblique reference).

Not a bad film but in my opinion this is not as good as “Wild Strawberries” which treated similar themes on a more intimate level – for such an iconic and mostly even-tempered film, the melodrama can be very heavy and bombastic. As the characters play symbolic roles, they lack depth and Block’s anguish may not appear very genuine to modern audiences. There isn’t much back-story to Block so viewers get no sense of how empty he might be at the beginning of the film, how spiritually dead and useless he feels, and so any triumph he achieves by the time he is claimed by Death has a reduced impact.

 

Persona: visually stunning minimalist meditation on identity, duality and the art of film-making

Ingmar Bergman, “Persona” (1966)

A visually stunning film, shot in black and white film and using contrasts of lighting and landscape to illustrate its themes of identity and the breakdown of boundaries between things thought to be separate, “Persona” is a minimalist film revolving almost entirely around two of Ingmar Bergman’s favourite actors. The plot is basic and in the hands of a hack Hollywood director could have become a campy horror lesbian porn flick. An actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullman) is stricken with a psychosomatic illness that renders her completely unable to speak. A young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) is assigned to Elisabet’s care. The head nurse of the hospital where Alma is caring for Elisabet suggests the two might like to stay at her seaside cottage for a while so that Elisabet can recuperate better. The two women duly go there.

The area where the cottage is located seems very remote and Alma talks constantly to keep the catatonic Elisabet’s spirits up. At first Alma engages in idle chit-chat about herself, then she opens up with deep-seated anxieties about herself and her relationship with her boyfriend, and admits to having had a fling with two young boys behind her fiance’s back. Increasingly Alma feels herself being dominated by Elisabet – she happens upon a letter Elisabet has written to her therapist and discovers that the patient has been “studying” her – and though she fights against what she believes is Elisabet’s projection of herself onto her own personality, she repeatedly succumbs to the “domination”. Elisabet for her part withdraws more and more into herself until she is incapable of responding to anything around her except through Alma. Which of the two will find the strength to break out of this unhealthy loop?

The minimalist style of the film calls forth questions about the two women that will remain forever unresolved. Is Elisabet really manipulating Alma, is her muteness deliberate – or is Alma imagining that she is being dominated because of her own insecurity and mental fragility? In one scene, Alma believes Elisabet has crept up on her during the night yet Elisabet denies having visited her in her bedroom: who is to be believed here? Is each woman suffering from an emptiness that only the other can understand and fill? Alma has had to abort a baby she probably wanted while Elisabet (according to Alma) gave birth to a child she didn’t want: the two women complement and complete each other through their female reproductive function. Is Elisabet “studying” Alma as a character she might play in a future acting role? Is Alma projecting her own imagination and experiences onto Elisabet as though suggesting a role in a future stage play?

Other themes about family and the maintenance and continuation of family relationships and connections also come to the fore; it is likely that Elisabet’s mental problem that is causing her speech blockage stems in part from deep-seated family issues, of which her ambivalence towards her son is an illustration and symptom. Another possible cause for Elisabet’s speechlessness may be her inability to empathise deeply with the suffering she sees on television (a Buddhist monk sets himself on fire in protest at the US military intervention in Vietnam) and in a famous photograph of Jewish women and children being rounded up by German Nazi soldiers; this inability also affects her relationships with her husband and son. Once Alma has guessed what Elisabet’s real problem is, she tries to make her escape. The physical escape may be easy enough but the film makes no suggestion that the mental escape is as smooth and quick.

Bergman deliberately inserted abstract elements and collages of images at the beginning, end and in the middle of the film to suggest that “Persona” itself isn’t to be taken seriously. The film is very much also about the art of film-making and the art of acting, with a message that to be effective, actors must study other people and become other people. There is a risk that in becoming another person, the actor may lose her identity and real personality. Thus Elisabet becomes completely catatonic once Alma discovers the root of Elisabet’s sickness and decides to break free of Elisabet’s hold over her.

The cinematography by Sven Nykvist is at once stunning and subtle, and while it is probably overdone it certainly emphasises the duality in the film and its characters: shots of Ullmann and Andersson together are arranged so that the actors’ faces, hands and upper bodies are overshadowing each other or can be imagined combined. The cottage setting close to the seashore hints of the land and the sea competing for domination over the other. Contrasts between light and darkness are emphasised: the actors frequently wear dark clothes to highlight this polarity. The film’s self-referential quality is highlighted in Alma’s rant to Elisabet about the latter’s ambivalent feelings toward her son, done twice: the first time from Alma’s viewpoint and the second time from Elisabet’s. It’s as if Alma is now directing Elisabet in what to say and do, what her motivations are, so that the mute woman knows what her character is to do next.

Because the film is so spare in its narrative and so open-ended in its plot and in the way it was filmed, no two people will see this and come away with the same conclusions about it. “Persona” will remain as much an enigma to viewers as Elisabet is to Alma and others around her.

 

 

 

Wild Strawberries: a road trip into self-discovery and examination that leads to redemption and self-forgiveness

Ingmar Bergman, “Smultronstället /  Wild Strawberries” (1957)

Few movies feature 80 or 70-something actors as lead characters so to see Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” with Viktor Sjöström in a lead role only a couple of years before his death at the age of 80 years is to see something special: an actor still at the peak of his powers and perhaps aware that his role will be his swansong piece. The film also features actors who regularly appear in many of Bergman’s films: Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow. Although the title in Swedish refers to something of sentimental personal value, Bergman uses the strawberry patch that appears early in the film as the launch-pad for a journey of self-discovery and examination, and a final redemption and reconciliation with the realities of life and custom.

Professor Isak Borg (Sjöström) learns he is to be honoured by his old alma mater the University of Lund with an honorary doctorate for services to medicine so with his daughter-in-law Marianne (Thulin), who is estranged from his son Ewald, he sets out on the long car journey from Stockholm to Lund. Along the way he and Marianne stop to look at his old family holiday home with its strawberry patch and memories of his youthful romance with a girl called Sara (Andersson) come to him. The unlikely duo continue on their way and pick up three teenage hitch-hikers, one of whom is called Sara (Andersson again). The five then nearly collide with another car and have to take on the married couple as passengers. The husband and wife quarrel so much that Marianne forces them to leave. The couple reminds Borg of his own unhappy and tumultuous married life and his wife’s infidelity.

The journey continues and at each step of the way Borg is forced by daydreams, memories and knowledge of his own impending death to admit that he has never been a model lover, husband and father, and that his own son Ewald has become as cold, rationalistic and status-seeking as himself. He is forced to see that his coldness drove away his sweetheart Sara, who ended up married to his fun-loving brother Sigfrid, and his wife (Gertrud Fridh) into an affair. He and Marianne visit his aged mother (Naima Wifstrand) and Marianne is shocked to see the aged crone as a cold bitch.

The five reach Lund and Borg duly accepts his award in a sterile and lifeless ceremony of mumbo-jumbo Latin and starched-collar comic parody quality. Later Borg bids adieu to the teenage Sara and her boyfriends; in the short space of a few hours Borg and the second Sara have become close friends. Borg’s son Ewald (Björnstrand) later tells Borg that he and Marianne have decided to reconcile. When Borg retires for the night, he dreams of a picnic in which he sees his parents again and he is at peace.

The film is low-key and quite serene in presentation, masking the deep emotions and the quest for meaning to a long but empty and shallow life. In the space of a few hours’ ride in a car a dysfunctional family’s problems are laid out with the use of ingenious methods such as dream sequences in which Borg finds himself a voyeur into dioramas of family life, heart-felt conversations he should have had decades ago with Sara, his wife’s secret love affair and encounters with death. Significantly at the beginning of the film, Borg is spiritually lifeless and his connections to human beings are cold and formal but through his car journey, he is forced by experience and memory, and the way new associations with people such as the teenagers and the quarrelsome couple bleed into his reveries, to acknowledge his weaknesses and arrogance, and through that acknowledgement become human and alive at last. By the end of the film, he has forged a new and more caring relationship with his daughter-in-law and might be well on the way to reconciling with his son.

All the acting is good though Bibi as the teenage Sara is a bit unbelievable as a typical 1950s hipster jiving teen who declares her love for an old man while flirting with two boys. Considerable poetic licence must be allowed – the car journey itself can’t have taken such a short time from sunrise to early afternoon and allowed Borg to have prepared properly to receive his award. The near-collision scene strains credibility as well but it’s what happens afterwards that is most significant.

Symbolism is important in the film: Borg’s dreams, in particular his nightmare at the beginning of the film, carry prophetic elements and even props such as the coffin in the nightmare, slipping out of its carriage like a squalling newborn, or the funeral cortege-like car Borg and Marianne drive to Lund have been carefully selected. The country landscape with its quiet trees and sinuous roads is a stoic contrast to the turbulence roiling in Borg’s mind. Sometimes the symbolism can be a little too heavy and forced as when branches of a tree appear to encircle Borg’s head from one scene to the next. The use of dreams as a way to explore issues of existence and the worth of one’s life and values can be inspired; in one dream sequence, Bergman uses a common dream theme – returning to school for an exam – to demonstrate how rationalistic Borg became and how his humanity was reduced as a result.

This is a film to be experienced for its visual beauty, its intelligence and philosophical questioning as well as for the fine acting and story of self-discovery and redemption through a car-trip.

Black Metal Satanica: not very Satanic and not very informative

Mats Lundberg, “Black Metal Satanica” (2008)

This documentary promised initially to be a fairly in-depth investigation of the Scandinavian black metal music scene and its agenda and for the first half hour “Black Metal Satanica” did entertain with a pleasing mix of band interviews, music and historical archive material. Over the rest of its 80-minute course though the film deteriorated into an unfocussed parade of interviews which suggests director Lundberg lost control of the project and let the musicians he interviewed take over. I was quite disappointed at how the film turned out as the mostly Swedish interviewees were well-spoken, polite and thoughtful, and offered interesting insights into the general tenor of the scene and their own motivations for joining it; they gave the impression of being able to answer almost any challenging and provocative questions Lundberg could have put to them. The film also offers snapshots of very interesting and often expressionistic black metal film clips and energetic concert footage. The mostly black metal music soundtrack which also features a little ambient music and even some Christian church choral music in parts runs throughout the film and gives it an energetic and aggressive ambience though it is never intrusive.

The most interesting section of the film is its examination of black metal’s opposition to Christianity and how this derives from the history of Christian proselytisation in Scandinavia at the tail-end of the Viking period: in many parts of Norway and Sweden, communities were forced to accept Christianity and baptism under threat of invasion. The film omits to add that temples dedicated to Odin worship were razed and churches built in their stead which would have explained the church burnings that mentioned later on. A link is made between Scandinavia’s Viking history and culture on the one hand and black metal on the other in a superficial way: the interviewees talk about self-respect and resisting the Christian influence on current society but there is little about the appeal of Viking values such as individualism, curiosity, an adventurous spirit which drove the Vikings to explore and colonise Iceland, Greenland and parts of North America, self-reliance and a desire to beat the elements, transcend death and be remembered for heroic exploits.

After this stirring episode, the film investigates early inspirations like the northern European physical environment and climate, and bands like Bathory, Mayhem and Burzum on black metal generally (no mention of Darkthrone and Emperor?) and delves into various black metal recreations such as grave desecrations, murdering homosexual men, church burnings, studying Anton Szandor LaVey’s Satanic Bible, self-mutilation and apocalyptic fantasies. Distinguishing between Norwegian and Swedish BM is non-existent; the credits that introduce each interviewee/s at least could have indicated which country they were from and Lundberg could have asked some Swedish subjects about when and how BM became popular in Sweden. I begin to wonder whether Lundberg is becoming enthralled or overwhelmed by the style of BM rather than its substance. There is plenty substantial that is suggested by the interviewees and the activities covered here which is not covered in much depth: black metal’s emphasis on pseudo-Nietzschean elitism, freedom of expression and individuality, and closeness to and concern for nature which lead to a love of land, nationalism and Romanticism (and National Socialist beliefs) which in their turn feed a hatred of humanity, pessimism about the future of the planet and ultimately a desire for an apocalypse or a series of disaster events that will sweep humans away into the dustbin of history and cleanse the Earth.

(I always smile wryly whenever I hear or see people say that a concern for the environment indicates a left-wing / socialist point of view with a concern for social justice: I only have to think of what I learned at high school and read in books and on the Internet since to remember that the one time when a bunch of nature-worshippers and environmentalists plus others among them took over an entire government by themselves was in Germany from 1933 to mid-1945. Even today, First World environmentalists frequently advocate one position or policy after another in various Third World countries without considering the impact their ideas might have on the people who would have to live with the fallout as well as the intended results: not a good look, I’m afraid.)

Past the halfway point, the narrator with the irritating American accent drops out and the film becomes a series of the same talking heads covering familiar ground. At one point the topic of Christian black metal (a mostly American sub-genre phenomenon in which BM elements are in the employ of a robust take-no-prisoners Christianity that shoots first before proffering the other cheek) is broached to the interviewees who express surprise and disbelief and for a brief moment the film shows some sparkle. When the closing credits arrive, I realise I didn’t learn much from “Black Metal Satanica” that I wasn’t already aware of and that there is plenty more Lundberg and his guests could have spoken about. Why does black metal have an elitist point of view rather than an inclusive democratic one? How much influence does Nietzschean philosophy have on the music and the sub-culture that surrounds it? Is that influence a superficial one or are black metal followers aware that to be an Übermensch, one must not only continually test oneself against insuperable odds but welcome such tests joyfully?

Black Metal Satanica? – not very much so as it turns out: the film serves best as an introduction for viewers not familiar with BM who moreover will have to do some extra homework on the BM agenda if they want to understand it fully.

WikiRebels: competent documentary on Wikileaks brushes the surface to maintain “balance”

Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist, “WikiRebels” (2010)

Made for Sveriges Television AB (SVT), this documentary traces the rise of Wikileaks, the global non-profit media organisation that publishes news and information of a private, secret or classified nature received from anonymous sources and whistleblowers, over a period of several months in 2010. The film is aimed at a general audience and, apart from showing a few scenes in the Wikileaks headquarters in Sweden and explaining the nature of the organisation, who hosts it and who its key people are or were, there is not much mentioned in the documentary that isn’t already public. Relying mainly on interviews, their own film footage and snippets of other TV networks’ newsreels, Huor and Lindquist have created a competent documentary that basically introduces Wikileaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange to the general public but does no more.

The really interesting part of the documentary is the broadcasting of the notorious air strikes on Baghdad, Iraq, on 12 July 2007, in which a team of two US Army Apache helicopters fired on several people and killed a number of men including two Reuters war correspondents in three air-to-ground strikes. The footage which was leaked to Wikileaks by US soldier Bradley Manning brought Wikileaks worldwide attention and led to the US government’s pursuit of Manning.

Some very brief information about Assange is presented before he formed Wikileaks and the film also traces his partnership with Daniel Domscheit-Berg before the two came to disagree on disseminating material without redacting some of it and Domscheit-Berg left Wikileaks to form Openleaks, essentially to be a distributor of information rather than a publisher (though so far it’s not lived up to its name and appears unlikely to). Other significant interviewees featured in the film include Icelandic politician / writer / artist / activist / Wikileaks volunteer … whew, let’s just say all-round talent Birgitta Jonsdottir and a former US State Department advisor Chris Whiton who has written articles for Fox News.

The film does try to maintain a “balance” so as not to appear too favourable towards Wikileaks and passes no judgement on Assange or Domscheit-Berg’s decisions and actions. Significantly Huor and Lindquist make no reference as to who funds or has funded Wikileaks operations in spite of suspicions, some of which have been voiced by Wikileaks volunteers, that Assange has taken money from semi-official Israeli sources. Although the film identifies considerable opposition, notably from the US government and its agencies, to Assange in releasing over 200,000 unredacted US diplomatic cables, it omits to mention that Wikileaks was forced to release these cables because journalists at UK newspaper The Guardian unethically revealed the password Assange used to protect a digital file of the cables in a book published by that paper. It would be ironic if Wikileaks and whistleblower Manning were to be destroyed by the actions of people associated with a major media institution supposed to have a reputation for responsible and ethical journalism; this suggests that Wikileaks’ greatest enemies are not necessarily governments and corporations paying lip service to democracy, clean operations and openness but for-profit media institutions with an interest in capturing and corralling their reading public’s desire for truth and accuracy in news reporting.

At this time of posting, Wikileaks’ survival was looking bleak after several defections by volunteers from the organisation, citing lack of transparency and Assange’s autocratic leadership style among other reasons for leaving, and it now seems to be a matter of when, not if, Wikileaks becomes history itself.