Ordet. La palabra

Time for my annual dose of Dreyer, taken like medicine. Is it fair that Dreyer has a reputation of being turgid, slow, archaic, depressing, theatrical? Well, yes. Look at this. A large part of the time is spent watching people walk slowly from one side of the room to the other. In fact, this seems to be Dreyer's main directorial idea because the rest of the time they just stand there like hatstands. At climactic moments a door may be opened. There is no attempt to vary pace or tone; the dialogue is as stilted as silent movie cards. In fact, this looked and felt like a film made in 1915, not 1955.

The film presents a Danish society so insular that subtle shades of Christianity tear them apart. That might be interesting if treated with any sort of subtlety or depth. Not here, where the plot is built with a few huge stone bricks. And we have not one but two of the most morose characters in all cinema. Old Borgen, who has the lion's share of the dialogue, always stares fixedly into the middle-distance while speaking - I presumed he was reading his lines off a card.

Dreyer is a man entirely without humour. The mad son Johannes looks like Rasputin with slicked down hair and an immaculate centre-parting; he thinks he is Christ and walks in and out slowly spouting religious twaddle in a high pitched monotone with no facial movement whatsoever. Perhaps Dreyer was paying homage to Ed Wood here. Johannes' every appearance is unintentionally hilarious. If he can't see this, Dreyer really must have something missing. If you're not laughing at Johannes yourself every time he appears, I'm not sure I want to know you.

And never have I been so let down by the ending of a film. A literal deus ex machina that I simply found intellectually offensive - all the more so because we can see it coming a long way back but are still led at snail's pace towards it.

Painfully sincere, and good for the soul maybe, but woefully unaccomplished. To be enjoyed only by Quakers.

So I finally arrive to the famous Ordet.

Three women are central in Dreyer's last three films, one every decade. In Days of Wrath she was trapped in a loveless marriage and looking for love she had been denied by a cruel turn of events. Here comes the second woman, in a loving marriage to one of three sons of a powerful father figure, radiant, kind, and eager for that love to flourish and spread in the household. The younger son has found love, she petitions the father to give his consent.

God stands between the two households which are locked in dispute about marriage, god implying a whole view of how the world is put together. The pater famiglia in the farmhouse believes in god as embracing the fullness of life, the tailor down the village espouses a mortifying god that rejects this life for the next. None of them is ready to give ground.

This disputation about god takes an even eerier shape; there's another son who has gone mad by an inner search for god and believes himself to be Jesus; the father's wish for someone to wake up mankind, a desire for a living voice for god, but that has given him a broken son, from his own pov, who is looked on with pity as an invalid. The father hopes against hope that he might come to his senses.

So, unable to set aside their ego in favor of loving- kindness, the woman who had embodied love falls to die. The father hastens back, a long, hard night of the soul follows as childbirth goes awry and her life hangs in the balance.

Okay now we have most of the parts; the whole is filmed in austere flows, almost entirely setbound in the two houses, as sparse as the god of these people. Dreyer is clearly on the side of the farmer, for a living god; you'll see this in how eager he is to sketch complex human beings, this is a man who takes pleasure in the brushing and slow reveal of human character, therein lies the richness. The scenes with the little girl and her mad uncle are some of the most heart- aching.

The parts in which Dreyer ruminates explictly on god and faith in a faithless world I pass by without much interest, I simply don't know what use I have for them, for example when the father is asked by a doctor if science saved his daughter-in-law or his own faith. I simply don't perceive them to be the matter of real spirituality, or in any way a road that leads out of a stifled soul. God will never make himself known in the way that tormented piety expects so it's moot to agonize, no? The world is always aglow with spirituality so long as the eye, the heart, remain effortless, able to let each thing mean itself.

Now we come to the famous ending with the miracle; one of the most famous in cinema probably.

It's possible, for Dreyer, that our ability to accept it or not is a test of our faith in the possibility of transcendence, it might be a case that to reject it out of hand is to already have a heart that is hardened. I don't know how much stock I would put in this view. For one, accepting it at face value, suspending disbelief, does it abet an eye that sees in fresh light something fundamental about how the world is put together?

Another IMDb reviewer makes a great observation, the woman looks eerie when she comes to, almost vampire-like. It's no accident that Dreyer has her almost bite her husband, cling with mouth agape, eyes unfocused, muttering "life" as if unable to remember kind of thing it is, joyous occasion or horrible ordeal.

No, I think let's blow the lid on this, let's deserve a Dreyer who isn't just a pastor preaching god. (He's not)

Dreyer is not a transcendental filmmaker (Tarkovsky is), he's a purist like Ozu. He's not shuffling walls of despair until they give way to light from above, he's distilling everything down to a pure view of the house. With the miracle, he's being existential, not spiritual.

Having said this, now we can go through the whole. If god, meant broadly as what we call that, is the fullness of life, it has to include the inevitable end of life and the suffering, this too no less a part of the fullness that needs to be embraced.

Dreyer seems to ask, why have you brought her back, now that you have? Is it just to cling on her as your only way to happiness?

Above all for me, it's the the way we wander around the house where now and then an afflicted son prophesies or repudiates, how we wait and come to, that makes this indispensable viewing. Bergman and Tarkovsky both begin here, each one pursuing a different strand of Dreyer.

... but you wouldn't know it. The spectrum of religious belief explored through the eyes of rural Danish families in 1925 - a tricky birth, falling for the wrong girl and a son who thinks he's Jesus sets the scene. Nothing to make you smile, except for the end which, depending on your own dogma, may allow you a brief smirk.

Subtly suspenseful. Thought-provoking. Unpredictable--there's nothing cliché about this film. The long, single shot scenes are a very refreshing change of pace and help build intrigue. I loved it! I confess I had never even heard of this film until tonight while watching it on TCM. What a gem! Although it seems to get off to a slow start, it gains momentum. You find yourself intrigued by each family member's personal dilemma. Surprisingly, nothing turns out the way you expect it to! It's like that favorite good book you can't put down. On a sour note, I was very disturbed by a scene when the town doctor is called to the farm to aid Inger's midwife during childbirth. I'd like to do some research and learn if the director was true to the medical practices of the time.

Before watching 'Ordet' I was not familiar with Carl Theodore Dreyer's sound films. Having previously watched his beautiful 'La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc', I knew what kind of motifs and themes were going to be prevalent - the strong female character and the emphasis on religion. However as soon as 'Ordet' started and until its conclusion, I was mesmerised and it personally hit me much more effectively than 'Passion'. What has been called by many as Dreyer's masterpiece is also my definition of a perfect piece of cinema. The relatively slow pace of the narrative and the lack of much of Kaj Munk's original dialogue may put some off, but if anything it enhances not only the emotive performances, but also the sense of uneasiness; of lost faith and of lost loved ones. In theory, the ending of this film shouldn't work, but it somehow manages to pull off the surprising and still be effective. By the conclusion of 'Ordet' you can believe that miracles can happen. Dreyer enables us to witness a miracle using a display of his faith combined with his stunning Mise en scène. I may not be sure about God, but this film made you think about the possibilities without preaching any kind of sentimentality and that in my opinion warrants a 10 rating. Essential viewing!