Picked Flick #44: Shame

Across all of the arts, I think that the most urgent and sophisticated depiction of war is the one Bertolt Brecht constructs in his play Mother Courage and Her Children, in which the rumbling of military convoys and the cracks of artillery are mostly offstage echoes. The focalizing character is Anna Fierling, dubbed "Mother Courage" for both laudatory and facetious reasons, who strains to make a living for herself and her three bastard children while trudging through the muddy, scabbed grounds of the battlefields and surrounding towns, selling her second-hand wares to whomever, on whatever side, of whatever nationality or political persuasion, is willing to part with a buck, or a mark, or a krona, or a pair of boots, or whatever. Brecht helps us to understand war as a series of dark negotiations with one's own ethics, with one's own being, and with the competing ways of construing oneself as a communal figure: as a partner, a parent, a patriot, a pragmatist, a profiteer, a bystander, an objector. No one now living—at least no one paying any attention—can doubt the continuing relevance of this viewpoint, and the need for its proclamation: war, when it is happening, and it is almost always happening, is never "over there," it is always here, in its reverberations, its roots, its dollars and cents, even in the most isolationist refusals of war's reality.

Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame presents itself in as un-Brechtian a style as it possibly could, but the intelligence and the inclusiveness with which it examines war as a social and human condition are very nearly on a par with Brecht's. In Bergman's Persona, made two years previously, Liv Ullmann reacts with mute shock and terror to televised images of martial atrocities in Southeast Asia, and to the horrifying conviction of a Buddhist monk setting fire to himself in protest of man's inhumanity. War provides a crucial context for the vicious psychological retrenchment that Persona subsequently explores, particularly via the Ullmann character, but Shame confronts the issue in a much more direct and thorough-going way. Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Ullmann and Max von Sydow) are married concert musicians who live out a rustic existence on a Scandinavian island—farming and raising chickens, struggling to get the radio and the truck engine to work, ferrying to the mainland for necessities and the occasional luxury indulgence. In Shame's first scene, Ullmann and von Sydow wake in their beds (not, crucially, the same bed), and as she rather brusquely dresses and washes her face, he forlornly recounts a dream of the previous evening. An undeniable chill, if not quite a hostility, exists between these people, though its relative severity will rise and fall through the first half of the film, sometimes warming to an optimistic intimacy, sometimes tumbling into a scary antagonism. Meanwhile, we learn quickly that whatever unnamed country of which the Rosenbergs are citizens, albeit quite secluded ones, has been rent for several years by civil war, whose armies might invade their own environs at any moment. In many films, even ones by Bergman, these dual narratives would serve as metaphors or reflections of each other: the on-and-off combat within the Rosenbergs' marriage and the literal war that, for now, is only visible in the processions of military trucks and the low-flying jets that occasionally pass overhead. The genius of Shame, though, rendered with stomach-turning immediacy and realism, is that we experience all of this as one narrative. The gnawing discontent between Eva and Jan is directly conditioned by the war; it is one of the thousands of tongues through which the war speaks. She expresses contempt for his tearful, paralyzed anxieties; he doesn't understand how she can listen to so much more of the radio coverage than he and yet reflect so much less sensitivity and fear in response; she wishes he would fix the fucking truck, partially so they will have a means of escape if marauding armies do appear, and partially because he's such a goddamned procrastinator in general. About a half-hour into Shame, with a speed, a potency, and a plausibility that are equally hard to bear, the martial conflict explodes at the Rosenbergs' very own door, frightening them to their cores, annihilating their privacy, and serving to draw them back together but also to make them scowl even more deeply at each others' shortcomings. Again, these personal clashes are not sidebars or collateral effects of the war: they are part of what war is. As circumstances deteriorate even further in Shame, so too do the relations between the Rosenbergs.

Along with how it pervades our personalities, slips under our very skins, the other vile and best-kept secret of war is its shapeshifting ability. Like a flammable liquid, it pours itself into any space or vessel, and is prone to ignite anywhere. The second half of Shame, now that the Rosenbergs realize how immersed they are in the crisis, shows how arbitrarily they are pawned between the opposing factions, how their friendships and their enmities become hopelessly confused, how in a very Brechtian fashion—if not, again, in a Brechtian idiom—war becomes a marketplace for terrible barters, including sexual ones, which give onto their own cycles of self-defeating revenge. If I'm making Shame sound like harrowing viewing, then I'm doing it justice; few films are so excoriating in their images or their trajectories. But there is nothing abstruse or reductive or inaccessible about it: it doesn't need manichean figures of good and evil like Platoon, or peekaboo movements in and out of the maelstrom like Saving Private Ryan, or even the ornate and remote meditative koans of The Thin Red Line. Ambitious and indispensable as Malick's movie is, its motivating quarry is the philosophical knot of war, whereas Shame draws the rutted map of war's psychology, in bold and grievous strokes recognizable to any audience, and liable to frighten and humble them all. Ullmann, exquisitely forceful and believable in her role, has exactly one Bergmanesque soliloquy about the states and layers of being and suffering, but even this builds to a ringing, legible, and haunting conclusion. Imagining the war-torn world as the collective nightmare of humanity, of a global conscience in a restive, inattentive sleep, she asks herself, "What happens when the person dreaming all of this and all of us awakes, and is ashamed?" (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1968 Svensk Filmindustri/Janus Films.

Here's Your One Chance, Fanny, Don't Let Me Down...

No worries; she didn't.

First, though, please recognize the headline as a mad-prop to Reba McEntire. I don't dip into the Country & Western end of the pool all that much, but when "Fancy" popped onto the radio of my local Ithaca bus this morning, I knew it would be a good day. What a friggin' great song. "Fancy" is like "Livin' on a Prayer": faux-working-class kitsch with such absolute conviction you want it immediately installed in the Library of Congress. And has there ever been a more merciless mid-song lyric line than "The welfare people came and took the baby, Mama died, and I ain't been back"? Genius. Work it, Reba.

But, from Reba to Ingmar (as ever, right?). Tonight I had the much-delayed pleasure of seeing the Swedish master's great Fanny and Alexander for the first time, in a restored 35mm print that might even have been 70mm, it looked so ridiculously gorgeous. How beautiful was this? So beautiful I started laughing, twice. Truly, I've never seen such a ravishing color print of a 20-year-old movie. This must be the print that Criterion used for the typically de luxe DVD set they released a few months back, which I'll now be buying as soon as ye olde budget permits.

But enough about the celluloid and the merchandising. The film is a jaw-dropper: one of the best films ever about theater, one of the best about family, one of the best and subtlest about the adolescence of an artist, and surely the only Bergman film likely to please fans of Persona, Dynasty, and Lemony Snicket. The time is the first decade of the 20th century. The opening moments have as many hues of red as Cries and Whispers does and the same eerie, cavernous quiet as The Silence, and yet it's clear from the outset that Bergman is headed in warmer directions. The hushed preparations for a holiday dinner give way before long to a thoroughly charming theatrical interlude and then to a sprawlingly sharp-minded family circus that George Eliot might have written in an atypically frisky mood, perhaps after a few mugs of nog.

The mini-saga that follows is full of wisdom and chill, widows and ghosts, finery and asceticism, possibilities and impossibilities. The human canvas is probably Bergman's richest since the comparably fizzy Smiles of a Summer Night, even though the familiar abyss of Bergmanesque terror and doubt is still palpable beneath both movies. Recognizable faces pass in and out, from a yarmulked Erland Josephson to a young Lena Olin; my favorite Bergman actress, Harriet Andersson, turns up in a small but enthralling role as a housekeeper with unreadable allegiances. Schumann and Britten on the soundtrack, sparingly but perfectly used. An angry doorknob, a gender-queer clairvoyant, a joyous abduction that is tersely subverted by a hauntingly incongruous shot. The middle hour is the least adventurous, but even then, watching Alexander learn to watch people—women, men, in that order—is like watching a young Ingmar Bergman assemble his genius through equal parts intuition, mischief, and dread.

As self-referential as Fellini's 8½, and comparably fun in its own very different way, Fanny and Alexander is simply the best film I've seen since Contempt in February, or maybe since The Travelling Players last June. It's my 16th Bergman movie; Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg, for better or worse, are the only directors whose work I have visited more often. Fanny thus joins, in order of their production, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Persona, Shame, and Cries and Whispers at the highest rank of my personal Bergman pantheon. (The others I've seen are Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Hour of the Wolf, The Magic Flute, Face to Face, Autumn Sonata, and After the Rehearsal.) Next up for me will be Scenes from a Marriage, with its sequel Saraband due to hit US theaters this summer. Meanwhile, for anyone looking for a 3 hour and 8 minute visual and narrative feast...you've found it!

P.S. Also, for any poor soul keeping track, Fanny is the fourth of my New Year's Resolution films that I've checked off in '05. Any suggestions for where to go next on these two lists are more than welcome!

Thanks to Gary Tooze and his terrific website DVDBeaver for the image captures; as Gary attests, they are from the R2/PAL DVD released abroad before the Criterion set, so the image quality only gets better from here, folks.