TITLE: Review: The Virgin Spring (1960) AUTHOR: Joe Johnson DATE: 6:31:00 AM ----- BODY:
Dir: Ingmar Bergman

An old Depeche Mode song questions the goodness of God in the realities of life. It imagines the death of a young girl, among other tragedies. Eventually, the song can only draw the conclusion that God is somehow sadistic: "I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God's got a sick sense of humour, and when I die, I expect to find him laughing." The British pop band may have seen The Virgin Spring, a movie intent to display the same dilemna of the brutality of an everyday existence and the apparent absence of God from His own creation. But if it drew only the conclusion that God was enjoying the evils of life, those artists missed the fullness of another artist's - namely Ingmar Bergman's - more devotional and faith-filled question.

Max Van Sydow rejoins Bergman as, Töre, the knight-father in this retelling of a thirteenth-century ballad. Töre's daughter is on a traditional pilgrimage to light candles at a distant church. Along the way, her innocence and optimism are betrayed. She is raped (in a surprisingly graphic presentation) and killed. Her body is left in the woods, robbed of all wealth and decency. Her violators leave the woods, unwittingly arriving at her family home for shelter.

There is a degree of dramatic tension from the moment the small band of murdering brothers arrives at the home. The story is still loose and in the formulation of plot, there's always the possibility that the brothers are found out and The Virgin Spring becomes a tale of vengeance. Then again, perhaps the brothers escape, only to be discovered later, long after they are free from the roof and reach of the bereaved father.

But either line would stunt what is actually a more ambitious, and more personal film. Bergman isn't telling this story to create a balance of justice in the universe, to answer some question about the innocent and the guilty. He means to ask a question that plagued him throughout his filmography: "Where is God?"

This is the question that the mother must ask, the question that Töre must face, especially in light of all that such violence and arbitrary loss must cost. If one can't trust their innocent daughter to be protected by God on a pilgrimage of faith, can one trust God for anything?

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the film is its tone. It is the very mark of quietness, yet remains a savagely violent film. Somehow, with Bergman, these two tracks are not contradictory. The still, religious life at the end of winter gives the film an air of peace and contemplation. But the events within this world are so aggressive, impassioned and harmful, that the stillness almost seems to be a divine facade, a distracting and disarming attempt by the Creator to mask the brutality of His creation.

The Virgin Spring is the epitome of the depressing foreign film, but it - like the very atmosphere of stillness and violence - is held in deep tension with an underlying devotion and goodness. It contains a hint of optimism and redemption, though only after the height of disappointment and sin. It is, at once, sin and forgiveness, freely engaged with the most persistent questions of religious thought. The Virgin Spring is a tale of contemplation and devotion, utterly fearless in it's humble attempts to ask God where He is in the world He created.

****1/2 of *****

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