Movie #55: Released in 1966, directed by Ingmar Bergman, 83 minutes. New to me!

LetterBoxd Score: 4 stars

I had been engaged throughout this movie, though I wouldn’t say viscerally engaged, when suddenly Elisabet’s husband was talking to Sister Alma and calling her Elisabet, and she insisted she was not. The shock of reorienting yourself in the kind of movie you are watching. This is no longer a story about the evolving relationship between a nurse and her patient; this is a (now) classic genre of film about dealing with inner turmoil by hallucinating another character. It’s fight club (complete with subliminal penis; hey, I get it now!)!

Sister Alma, by this point in the movie, isn’t real. She’s a projection, or a persona. Elisabet is striving to reconcile conflicting inner drives; her desire to be a good mother (or maybe society’s internal pressure to be a good mother) with her resentment towards her child. She has tried going mute and withdrawing from the world. Now she tries conjuring up an imaginary self, who is a fantasy version of what her life could be. It’s the interaction between herself and this fantasy that we’ve been watching.

It was exciting to see that this movie had another level; but also very slightly deflating that this was it. We’ve seen this kind of thing a few times by now. Maybe it was novel at the time, but not today. Moreover, it’s slightly fantastic; I guess it makes good use of film by finding a way to visually depict what’s going on in the mind, but this just isn’t the kind of thing that happens to most people, limiting its universal appeal. And the theme of maternal guilt has also been done again and again by now. Plus there was the deflation of having solved a mystery and now being “done” with something.

Except… maybe not? On later reflection, I started to think that nothing I had seen really established unambiguously that Alma was a projection of Elisabet. In fact, isn’t it Alma at the outset who says she worries that Elisabet is mentally stronger, and speculates that she could turn into Elisabet if she really wanted to. Maybe I actually have things exactly backwards: Elisabet is a projection of Alma. Alma is guilt ridden over her abortion, and starts to imagine herself as the mother Elisabet who has a child, but resents it.

The more I read about it, the more it became clear that the movie is probably designed to frustrate any particular interpretation (including ones I haven’t listed here). I think that is the mark of something really good; this sense of multiple interpretations fitting 85% of the way. That means you’re always denied the disappointing closure of totally solving a film and putting it away.

I think if I rewatched this, I would notice a lot more clues that point one way or another. There are a few movies on this list that I think would reward a reviewing; but because this one is just 80 minutes, I think it’s pretty likely that will actually happen.

What else did I like?

• The faces
• That dreamy scene at night, when Elisabet comes into Alma’s room
• Alma’s story of sex on the beach

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

The way Bergman films faces is beautiful; and he has a knack for dreamlike imagery. Add to that a (revolutionary for the time?) way of visually depicting mental turmoil, and an ambiguity that makes it endlessly rewatchable, and I can see a lot of people viewing this as one of the greatest movies ever made.

For me, I want to care more about what happens to the characters though.

Next: Andrei Rublev