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Shame (1968) by Michael Atkinson Gritty, brutal and supple, Ingmar Bergman's Shame (1968) stands as one of the best antiwar films ever made, a fact made more amazing by its relative lack of notoriety, even among Bergman aficianados. With a particular and refreshing abstention from art-house navel-gazing, Shame is an apolitical home-front horror show where life during wartime slowly shifts from existing in a state of petty complacency to, literally, drifting in a sea of corpses. Focusing exclusively on the way war unsettles and corrupts the lives of civilians, Bergman's film scans on a primal level like a "Twilight Zone" episode gone unstoppably, sickeningly real. Longtime Bergman partisans Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow play the Rosenbergs, a painfully average, childless couple who run a small farm in the hinterlands of some unnamed European country. Ullmann is utterly pragmatic, and terminally impatient with her husband, whom she perceives as a spineless man-child. Von Sydow does, in fact, behave like a spoiled puppy much of the time, spontaneously bursting into tears and whining about imagined physical disorders. Just as often, though, the two warm up emotionally like young lovers, planning out a cozy future we know (if the ominous phone calls, army convoys and distant church bells are any indication) they'll never have. |
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"I think it is awful when [church] bells ring on an ordinary day," von Sydow says thoughtlessly as the two of them pack their car with berries to sell in town, and he has no idea how awful awful can be. Once they begin their odyssey from the outskirts into the belly of the beast, it's apparent to both them and us that nothing could have prepared them for the experience of seeing society fall down around their ears. The portents of war--rumors, drafts, stories circulating around town about concentration camps--escalate into the stuff of nightmares when jets fly low over the Rosenberg homestead and the nearby forest explodes in flames. Their farm smack-dab in the middle of a spastic landing zone littered with dead paratroopers hanging from trees, Ullmann and von Sydow hit the road further into madness, repeatedly forced to circle back to their war-torn fields, No Exit-style. The war in Shame is purposefully generic: there are no good or bad sides, no talk of politics. We're just as lost as the Rosenbergs as to why the war is happening, and exactly who the invading forces are. Who may be winning the war game is perpetually irrelevant: Ullmann and von Sydow are beaten by one side; their home is torched by the other. We see war from the ground level, where borders and fronts are invisible, and anyone with a gun has his own idea of prairie justice. |
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Ullman and von Sydow's journey to the end of night wreaks havoc on both their marriage and their identities. Whereas Ullman is systematically disempowered by the anarchy, von Sydow graduates from being a blithering coward to a ruthless survivalist, able to kill, willing to leave his wife behind if that's what it takes to escape the no man's land alive. Finally, the series of desperate transactions, humiliations and trials the Rosenbergs endure leads them to a captain-less fishing boat, which, in Bergman's most expressive image, is stuck nightmarishly adrift in a mile-wide current of floating soldier carcasses. Pure as a war film can get--that is, unsullied by prejudices, rationalizations or knee-jerking--Shame is Bergman at his most blistering. Unlike most of his other films, Shame doesn't waste time with long, brooding dissertations on God's silence or vague questions of spiritual identity. It's also generally ixnay on the symbols that have so badly dated his earlier films (the clocks without hands, Death walking on the beach). Instead, Bergman proves his filmmaking mettle by going for the viscera with a realist's right-hook, making The Seventh Seal look like a screwball farce by comparison. With beautiful gray-on-gray cinematography by Sven Nykvist, Shame is a universal yet miniature version of ordinary life run amok and under fire--apocalypse on the half shell. Shame is easily the most neglected of Bergman's masterpieces, even at the time of its release, a fact perhaps due more to the director's surprising dismissal of poetic gimmicks than its unfashionable decontextualization of a war's specific horrors in the era of Vietnam. Still, it was widely lauded by reviewers, hailed by Pauline Kael as "a flawless work," and heaped with critics' prizes. At long last available on video, perhaps Shame can finally be reestablished where it belongs in the Bergman corpus and in the broad view of world cinema--on the top shelf. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. |