TITLE: Review: Winter Light (1962) AUTHOR: Joe Johnson DATE: 8:54:00 PM ----- BODY:
Dir: Ingmar Bergman

In a Kids in the Hall skit, the comedy troupe creates a faux Italian film, a Fellini-esque exaggeration that rips on American films: "Always with the happy ending." The rise of the indie film, and the success of the R rating have both muted this caricature. But it is true, American films are predominantly comedies - at least in the technical sense of the word – “always with the happy ending.”

If this stereotype has any truth then the inverse, the idea that foreign films are all tragedies, may also have some basis in fact. Ingmar Bergman has done little to tear down the impression of artsy, melancholic films about the harshness and isolation of life. Winter Light appears to be an archetype of such a perspective. Yet, appearances, like the pristine Swedish winter, can be deceiving.

Winter Light tells the tale of a pastor and his remarkably small group of parishioners. Pastor Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) presides over the conclusion of a church service, and then retires to his study where he engages his agnostic mistress Märta (Ingrid Thulin), the hopeful hunchback Algot (Allan Edwall) and the suicidal fisherman, Jonas (Max von Sydow). The small cast is matched with a small story. This is simply a three hour Sunday afternoon between services. However, in that time, the pastor loses faith, a man loses his life, a woman is widowed, another woman is harshly scorned and a simple man gives a beautiful reflection on the Passion.

In a counseling session between Pastor Ericsson and Jonas, we learn that Jonas is there only for a shred of hope, a reason not to kill himself. This plea exposes Ericsson's own emptiness. He has nothing to offer except his own questions of whether life is worth living. The meeting concludes with Jonas quietly leaving the room and the pastor quoting Jesus on the cross: "God. Why has thou forsaken me?"

This scene - joined with the subtlest and most precise piece of camera work since Citizen Kane - is both painful and poetic. The pastor is left with a sense of temporary peace, as if finally freed from the requirement to believe. He is free to say and do anything he wishes, no longer bound by either his fantasy of God's goodness or his puzzlement over God's mystery. The world simply is what it is, without mystery or purpose, without judgment or objective.

Though seen as a lesser, rougher work by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the photography creates another character. The English title Winter Light (as opposed to the literal Swedish title - Naatvardsgasterna - "the communicants") speaks of the way that such coldness and brilliance cooperate. There is almost a paradox to the idea: the deadness of winter against the clarity of light. Nykvist, Bergman and Björnstrand keep this tension throughout the film, never tempted to place faith and nihilism against one another. Instead, they must exist. In the cruel, harsh world it is easy to see only the winter. In the church it is easy to see only the woodwork, the images and tales of a loving and benevolent God. In this work, as in much of Bergman's corpus, faith is not clean.

Ericsson's loss of faith, as a duty to his profession and his parents, is said to have paralleled Bergman's own realization that his childhood faith was abandoned. Yet, perhaps this too is overly simple. Bergman, like the pastor, does not leave religion so easily, for with him and his characters, God is a constant presence, even in his absence. It is this loss of faith from another period of life - whether in childhood or the assumed religion of culture - that one is finally freed to believe. Winter Light, despite its tragic plot, is a testament to finding belief in a new way, through a simple reminder of the stories that still hold true and the God that is hidden in the cold and the light.

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

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