SHAME (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Civil war continues. Jan and Eva Rosenberg, both musicians (read: apolitical artists), have retreated to an island, where they farm. They are an alternately warm, good-natured and combative couple. Eva (Liv Ullmann, giving her best-ever performance—best actress, Guldbagge Award, National Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review) lightly, charmingly tells Jan over dinner outdoors, “I don’t think you know what love is.” Women often think this about their men, but we figure that Eva in this instance is right.
     Jan (Max von Sydow, playing this unpleasant character as well as possible) is a pain; he gets a comical case of cramps while kissing his wife. After Eva has sex with her former lover, village mayor Colonel Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand, giving the best performance), cowardly Jan is responsible for Jacobi’s brave death, giving Eva grief riddled with guilt. Indeed, Jan retreats into callousness, beating Eva and killing a young injured soldier, a frightened deserter hiding out. I am not sure that war’s capacity to reveal Jan’s true nature comports with writer-director Ingmar Bergman’s antiwar intent.
     Skammen has a good deal to commend it. It is a Swede’s fine assault on neutrality. (“Do you even care what political system you live under?” a soldier demands of Eva.) It is a committed antiwar film at the time of the Vietnam War. It is perhaps the most brilliant piece of black-and-white cinematography in Sven Nykvist’s career: soft and diffuse, as though the bombings and artillery fire were cumulatively causing matter to disintegrate before our eyes. Indeed, human figures, when they are not shadowlike, seem to be disappearing into the gray. No wonder the prizes for Bergman, the film, Nykvist.
     But, for me, crabby marital melodrama wobbles the whole. Skammen certainly looks like a masterpiece; but is it?
     No.

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THE BEST INTENTIONS (Bille August, 1992)

The courtship and early marriage of Ingmar Bergman’s parents in early twentieth-century Sweden, a poor, self-sensitive Lutheran priest and a cultured girl from a wealthy family: this is the narrative territory of Danish filmmaker Bille August’s somber, absorbing, beautifully scored Den Goda viljan. August, working from a script by Bergman, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, which is given a visual presentation appropriate to the spare lighting of the time in which the chronicle is set. Pernilla August, August’s wife at the time, also won as best actress for her exquisite performance as Anna Åkerblom, whom Henrik Bergman desires to possess as much as loves. The glowing, at times miraculous color cinematography is by Jorgen Persson. Although their film largely unfolds in underlit interiors (but without the heaviness or generated eyestrain of The Godfather), Persson and the director achieve especial brilliance in one of silent Scandinavian cinema’s celebrated areas of achievement: humanity glimpsed in beauteous Nature. One particular such image, projecting Henrik’s self-absorption and melancholy, is a stupendous shot.
     Anna’s fastidious mother (Ghita Nørby, giving the best performance) does everything she can to undo the young couple prior to their marriage; when her own husband, Anna’s father (Max von Sydow), dies (“I lived in his love,” Anna says), she confesses her schemes to her daughter.
     The unmarried couple quarrel even over the wedding. A cathedral wedding has been planned, one—cruel irony!—“as great as our happiness,” according to Anna; but disgusted with Anna’s family and pressing his authority, Henrik opts instead for a simple ceremony: the couple, the marrying priest, two witnesses. Before relenting (offscreen, with a cut to the lavish ceremony), Henrik balks: “It’s clear you’re on your family’s side against me.”
     Sounds to me like his son’s father.

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WALTZ WITH BASHIR (Ari Folman, 2008)

Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war included the massacres of Palestinian civilians in refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. Phalangists, Lebanese Christian militants, committed these atrocities, but with Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s heads-up. Under orders, then-soldier Ari Folman, writer-director-star of Vals Im Bashir, set off flares that in turn set the Phalangists to their murderous task. Now—Folman probably adopted all this for the film—he is “dissociative” regarding his experiences that fateful day; he cannot recall the massacres. To piece together his memory of the historical event, he interviews old army comrades and a psychoanalyst.
     This remarkable, haunting film is (until a final coda consisting of news footage) an animated documentary! The action nearly starts in a recurrent nightmare belonging to a friend of Ari’s; bad dreams seem to stick to combat veterans like flypaper. This friend, Boaz, killed dogs so that they couldn’t warn people of what was coming; he explains, “You know, I wasn’t capable of killing people.” Well, but what he did facilitated the killing of people. Indeed, the entire film is hallucinatory, dreamlike, eerie, nightmarish. The title refers to Lebanon’s back-then just-assassinated Israel-friendly president, Bashir Gemayel, posters of whom abound. The “waltz” is a soldier’s dance as he indiscriminately fires his weapon—an image that encapsulates a denial of responsibility. Not everyone kills; but the burden of guilt, hence the denial of responsibility, is generous and wide.
     Some of the details here of this guilt are inapt and ridiculous—for example, Ari’s feeling like a Nazi at a Second World War death camp. No matter. The use of animation exquisitely distances both the gross and unearthly horrors of war. A field of wounded and dead Arabian horses reminds one of a passage in Wajda’s Lotna (1959), which Folman’s version surpasses.

CENTRAL STATION (Walter Salles, 1998)

“Did you know that all women in Rio have sex before marriage? All of them”: Nine-year-old Josué says this in a rest stop lavatory to the trucker giving him a ride north as the boy, whose mother was killed by a car before his eyes, searches out his father, who abandoned them both some time ago. Josué is being chaperoned by Dora, the protagonist, a retired teacher armed with the boy’s father’s presumed address in Central do Brasil, co-written (along with João Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein) and directed by Walter Salles, all of whose major works are “road pictures.”
     Dora is hardly likeable at the outset. She exploits poverty and ignorance by charging a progression of passers-through at the Rio train depot for writing letters, some of which detail their exploitation by others, their hopes and most personal matters. Few of these get mailed; at home, she has a drawer stuffed with the letters, and others she rips up as useless. She wrote two such letters for Josué’s mother, who sought reunion with the boy’s father for the boy’s sake and her own, right before she was run over while crossing the street. This man drunkenly beat her, but she missed him; apparently he had been good in bed. Dora has a basis, then, for rationalizing destroying the letters; but Josué achingly wants to meet his father and now has no one else in the world. After selling him to a criminal duo that merchants children, Dora guiltily reverses course, kidnaps Josué and heads out with him, by bus and thumb, to find his father. A voluptuously candled pilgrimage—courtesy of color cinematographer Walter Carvalho, most of this film is gorgeous—marks the climax of the gradual redemption of Dora from self-centeredness and selfishness. Her deepening bond with Josué reconnects her with her own father’s memory, her own past. Now she wants to taste life and wear lipstick again; “I long for everything,” she says.
     The odd pair never do find Josué’s dad, but Dora deposits him with two young men who at least claim to be the man’s sons, although—so much of this film is farfetched—she never relays that Josué may be their half-brother. One glance at Josué sandwiched between the two older boys in bed and Dora steals away before dawn, sacrificing her own connection with him so that he may have the home to which one of the brothers believes their father will someday return. Josué believes this, too—but some of us will recall that after witnessing his mother’s fate he also was convinced of her imminent return from hospital. I am not sure of this, because the English subtitles were extremely hard to decipher, but the father’s name may be Jesus.
     Fernanda Montenegro (best actress, Berlin, Havana, Los Angeles critics, National Board of Review) is impressive, but Salles’s film is easy, convenient, at times ridiculous. Rather than a serious study of poverty or of spiritual growth, it is a sentimental tear-jerker—like Kramer vs. Kramer or Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1979, 1984).

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AMERICA AMERICA (Elia Kazan, 1963)

This flat-sounding, laborious film opens with emphatic voiceover superimposed on wide-angle shots of Anatolia, ancient home of Greeks and Armenians that the Turks long ago conquered: “My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because my uncle made a journey.” Like Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1998), the film is presented as a family legend, a fable. But Life gives the reason for the family tale (to console a growing child with an absent parent’s love); Kazan never gives a hint as to the purpose of his. It is a fragmented, largely incomprehensible film.
     The action begins in 1896; oppressed minorities are rising up against ruling Turks. (The Turks “spit in your face and tell you it’s raining.”) Stavros (Stathis Giallelis) is the protagonist—the opportunistic boy who journeys, episodically, to the United States. This is Kazan’s uncle.
     The acting is mediocre; Haskell Wexler’s rough-hewn black-and-white cinematography, striking, a fusion of poetry and grit, but heavily influenced by Marcello Gatti’s in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples (1962). (Both films also share cast member Frank Wolff.) Half-buried in the narrative, regarding his family’s uncertain faith in Stavros, to whom they entrust all their money, sending him to Constantinople so that he might succeed in business and send for all of them, is Kazan’s rationalization for his conduct before HUAC. A personal end, in Stavros’s case his desire to make it to America, justifies the means, even treachery. (“You can’t afford to be human. People take advantage.”) Kazan even doubles this strain in the material as Stavros betrays, later on, his wife, who, dreaming the truth, conveniently gives her consent! Stavros suggests Kazan himself.
     Intrusive music and frenzied dancing abound. Dede Allen’s editing is expert.

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