I agree about the actors’ interviews being narrative devices, especially the first two, and I think these moments also feed into your questions about hope and empathy.
We start with Max von Sydow discussing the difficulty of empathising with (and therefore inhabiting and ‘playing’) a character who deliberately conceals his emotions, but by explaining this von Sydow also makes his character more accessible to us, the audience. Andreas is so closed off that we might otherwise have assumed he is simply a blank, under-written character, and we need to have some kind of a handle on his emotional state in order to follow the (minimal, character-driven) plot.
Later on, Liv Ullmann expresses sympathy for Anna’s belief system, and for her tendency to retreat into lies when reality doesn’t accord with her faith. We have sort of been told this about Anna already, by the juxtaposition of the letter from her husband with her overly impassioned outburst at the dinner table, but the film goes out of its way to underline this crucial fact about her character – perhaps especially because Anna is about to disappear from the film for a while, during the brief affair between Eva and Andreas. We’ll need to remember this flaw, or conflict, that defines Anna’s behaviour, if we’re going to understand what happens at the end.
Similarly, the interviews with Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson occur once the film has finished with their characters: there’s no longer any room for them in the actual story, but the interviews ask us to bear them in mind all the same, and to consider their role and significance.
There is a kind of narrative arc in these interviews, that moves from alienation, through empathy and hope, and back to alienation. Andreas is an emotional recluse who may or may not be able to open himself to another person; Anna is searching for something (i.e. someone) on which to anchor her faith, and may resort to destructive lies in order to fulfil this quest; Eva is trapped in the identities others project on her, and to understand her ‘true self’ we would have to speculate beyond the confines of this film; Elis has retreated in disgust from the world around him, indifferent to other people and assuming they are indifferent to him.
The interviews mark this whole film as a pessimistic space, in which Bergman and his collaborators ‘argue the case’ for loneliness as an inevitable and cyclical state. People are too flawed, deluded, weak, crazy, and/or callous to be able to sustain meaningful relationships with each other or themselves; they are always haunted by their past mistakes and fated to repeat them, staggering back and forth along the same miserable stretch of road until they do the rational thing and break down in despair. ‘This time his name was Andreas Winkelmann’, says Bergman over the final shot, as Andreas disintegrates into the grainy static of the excessively blown-up image. Like the photographer in
Blow Up, these people are empty fictions invented to illustrate the fundamental emptiness of existence, and having served this function they vanish into the ether, along with the film itself.
These moments that emphasise the artificiality of what we’re seeing do invite empathy, and imply that empathy is essential for those telling the story and for the audience. But I think they also negate empathy, not just because the story they are helping us to navigate is one about the futility of real empathy (cf. Elis’ photographs, recording an ‘interplay of forces’ but never accessing any deeper emotional truths), but also because they violate our suspension of disbelief and make us reflect on these characters as artificial constructs.
I don’t want to overstate that point: our suspension of disbelief is always ‘willing’, and conscious, and we always know that fictional characters are not real; that doesn’t mean we don’t feel anything for them. On balance, in the course of my life I’ve probably felt more (and sometimes deeper) emotions in relation to fictional people than I have for real ones. (No, I don’t get out much.)
But still, there is something jarring and cold-blooded about these meta-cinematic flourishes in Bergman’s films, especially when the clapper announces that this is ‘Take 4’ (for von Sydow’s interview) or ‘Take 7’ (for Ullmann’s). Not only is the ‘film’ a fiction, but even the documentary about the film is a fiction, painstakingly directed, rehearsed, and re-taken until it’s ready to serve its designated function; and by the same token, those parts of the fictional story that are shot like a documentary come to seem less ‘real’ and authentic than they are ostensibly trying to seem.
This makes us more conscious of what the film is selling us, and what methods it is using to do so. We can reject its pessimism about humanity and, like Ullmann or Andersson, choose to feel sympathy for these flawed characters or imagine happier endings for them once they escape Bergman’s clutches. On the other hand, we can also see a layer of irony compromising any moments of hope. When Andersson talks about Eva being redeemed and ‘blessed’ after her (imagined) attempted suicide, she is suddenly bathed in celestial sunlight, and the moment plays out like a happy accident that was ‘left in’… But we know it wasn’t an accident, partly because of the clues that mark these as scripted moments, but also because we then see the same redeeming sunlight bathing Johan following
his suicide. Again, we don’t have to react cynically to these effects just because they are pointedly artificial – but personally I do get a cynical vibe from them.
All of which is to say that, no, I don’t see this as a very empathic or hopeful film, and I read it in the same despairing way as Rayon Vert (in the post quoted above). The people – characters and actors – are just like any of the other objects, tools, and tricks being toyed with by the film-maker, all in service of a defiantly unedifying tale. At times it appears as though we are being asked to feel for the characters and invest in their relationships, like in a ‘normal’ piece of fiction, but these connections are always scuppered. Why don’t we see the start of Andreas and Anna’s relationship, instead hearing about it second-hand from Eva, and then in a re-cap from the narrator? Why, having been thrust abruptly into the midst of this relationship, does it suddenly disintegrate for reasons that we can sort of infer but that haven’t really been made clear?
This is the main reason I don’t like this film very much, and why I like the previous films in the ‘island trilogy’ only slightly more. Bergman seems to be experimenting with a way of telling relationship-focused stories that perversely denies the audience any clear sense of progression or development, by leaving out significant moments or refusing to explain causes and motivations. I guess that’s an interesting thing to try and do, and I like that Bergman is always stretching himself, but overall I just feel like these three films are half-baked and unsuccessful experiments, albeit with lots of powerful and beautiful moments. I also feel like these are all things he did much better in other films, and on most days I would rather watch
Persona or
Scenes from a Marriage again.
A couple of other notes:
TWBB, in regard to the title, I think ‘passion’ is being used here more in the ‘Passion of the Christ’ sense, i.e. meaning ‘suffering’, a painful state or experience that is imposed on someone and which they have to endure. It may also mean ‘passion’ in the more conventional modern sense: when the narrator describes the relationship between Andreas and Anna, he says it is without quarrels or ‘passions’ (and it sounds like the Swedish word here is ‘passions’). In that context I would think the point is that their feelings for each other are not intense enough to prompt any strong outbursts of emotion: Andreas is too afraid of humiliation, and Anna too afraid of disillusionment, to expose themselves, until something snaps in those last few minutes… Anyway, I read the title as referring to all five of the main characters (including Johan), to the condition of lonely despair that reality has imposed on them, and to the various ways in which they all try and deal with this. I think that’s what the film is about, just as
Shame is about how we respond to the conflict and brutality that prevails in the world around us.
I love some of the things Bergman does with colour in this film. In general the colours are very muted and subtle, to the point that it doesn’t feel like a drastic change when we transition to Anna’s black-and-white dream. But the transition out of the dream is very striking, from the bloodied but black-and-white corpses to the shattered red tiles. Liv Ullmann’s eyes seem impossibly blue in some shots, reflecting her heightened and self-deceiving perception of the world. Andreas’ stained-glass windows create dramatic lighting effects, as though his house were designed to express the emotions that he cannot.
And finally to respond to something Rayon Vert said about the ending:
Rayon Vert wrote:I noticed for the first time that when at the end he grabs the wheel of the car that Anna’s driving and causes a near accident, one of the quick cuts is to a mirror ornament, a teddy bear twisting and being “strangled” by the string around its neck, that links to the earlier twisting and strangled dog in the film
I think Anna tries to drive the car off the road, and Andreas grabs the wheel (just as his namesake did before him) to stop her. The implication (I think...) is that she killed her husband and son to avoid ‘losing’ them, and has now tried to do the same to Andreas, and (I think) that this is why she came to pick him up from the burning stable.