The Serpent's Egg

The Serpent's Egg is almost universally panned because it bears the signature of Ingmar Bergman, yet it doesn't feel much like a Bergman movie - except in a couple of flashes.

Most of the movie is set in dark, humid and chilly inter-war Berlin, where the protagonist gets ever closer to a sinister revelation. This side of the movie feels a bit like another bleak 70s artifact, Soylent Green. When David Carradine gets - at last - hired as an archivist in a sinister clinic, the viewer's interest is piqued.

However, Carradine is saddled with a sister-in-law, Liv Ullman, who comes along with a different set of scenes, that recall Cabaret without the acrid verve of the original. Liv Ullman tries hard, but she is truly miscast. Jane Birkin would have been perfect in this role.

The dialog is poorly written and gives the movie the choppy quality that everyone has objected to. The lines sound translated, unnatural, and David Carradine can't be faulted for sounding lost.

The big budget is well spent, and the film is not boring, nor pretentious. Some effects are in poor taste (the opening credits, and an excruciating scene in a brothel).

I suspect that The Serpent's Egg would have a better reputation today if it had been signed by a lesser director, say, George Pan Cosmatos. Without changing a single shot, it would be remembered as an interesting attempt at something different.

Fear, Loathing, and Despair in Berlin, November 1923

This film universally considered "the master's failure" but I don't agree with the statement. It is very different from the rest of Bergman's films I've seen but that does not make it failure for me. It is only Bergman's second film in English and it boasts an unusual for his films large budget (Dino De Laurentis was a producer) with enormous and elaborate sets. Bergman was able to recreate on the screen Germany (Berlin) of 1920th exactly how it was seen in the films of 1920th German directors - Fritz Lang's films come to mind first. Another film that The Serpent's Egg reminded me of was Bob Fosse's Cabaret - the theme of the Feast during the Time of Plague sounds very prominent in both films, and the cabaret's musical numbers in Bergman's film could've came from Fosse's. I was very impressed by Liv Ullmann's singing and dancing in the beginning of the film - she can do anything.

In spite of the film's obvious differences from Bergman's earlier work, it explores many of his favorite themes. It is in part a political film about the helpless, distressed and terrorized members of society that face the merciless and inevitable force of history and are perished without a trace in the process. Also like the earlier films, The Serpent's Egg explores its characters' self-isolation, inability to communicate, their attempt to cope with the pain of living, their despair, fear, and disintegration.

The Serpent's Egg may not be a perfect film and a lot has been said about the abrupt and heavy handed ending, the dialogs that don't always work, and David Carradine's performance as a main character. Perfect or not, I think it is an interesting, visually always amazing (cinematography by Sven Nykvist is above any praise) and very honest and thorough study of the human condition in the unbearable situation.

In the documentary 'Serpent's Egg: Away From Home' (2004), Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann and David Carradine talk about making the film, how it started and how and why it was so different. Liv said that couple of years ago she and Bergman had seen The Serpent's Egg for the first time, and they both liked it. I am in a good company, then, because I believe that Serpent's Egg is an unforgettable film and everyone who was involved in making it should not be ashamed of it. I am yet to see a Bergman's film that I don't like.

One can look at Ingmar Bergman's the Serpent's Egg as being many things, but it should not be looked at through the same prism that one looks at say Through a Glass Darkly or Scenes from a Marriage. This is Bergman being 'cinematic', and for the lone moment of a career spent with low-budget film-making and theater as his passions, a big-budget, a Hollywood star, and a sprawling canvas to work on, was at his finger-tips. It's also one of his few shots at not only an 'homage' kind of movie, but also one in English (one of only two). So it's the dark horse (no pun intended) when compared to the more one-on-one based films. This time the star, David Carradine, is not only an acrobat, but also in a city where the environment is grim, to the point of a scarcity of hope amid the post WW1 German cityscape. It's not the kind of film, in other words, that'll make money in the mass US market coming off the high of Star Wars (though it's been said that this film did make back it's money in Europe and then some). It's the kind of uncompromising vision that goes for broke, and it's a fascinating journey.

Carradine, who is at his best with a certain style and down-played quality that keeps him still cool today, is an American in Berlin, where his brother's just died in a rather grotesque fashion. This puts a certain immediate marker of doom over him and his sister in law, played by Liv Ullman (if, for no other reason to see the film, it's for her work, as usual). Over the span of a week (surprisingly so, if not for the voice over one might feel it being longer), amid the rain and nights and drunken stumbles and over-heated moments, Abel Rosenberg tries to deal with all that's going on. But there are stranger things lurking ahead with his upcoming job. This story is dealt with by Bergman in a curious way- it SEEMS a little longer at times, but it doesn't lose a certain momentum, of stripping away its character's defenses bare. Even Carradine, an actor who's mostly had a career as a larger-than-life kind of persona, gets intense with his work here.

Where Bergman gets entangled in everything he's got going on is a sense of structure to it. It's not the kind of 'soul-searching, hell if I know if God can help' film, but one more connected to the perverse, lurid qualities of the control some people could have over these people at this point of time in the world. One could say it's connected stylistically with the films of Murnau and Lang, however I would argue that more than half the time I did still feel like I was seeing a Bergman film, with his part n parcel cinematographer Sven Nykvist expressing greatly what is there in the huge set constructed of 1922 Berlin. And because of this, there's still the close-ups, and the surreality that's induced. But because there's so much to work with, with sometimes overwhelming scenes (like when Carradine walks into that bar, loaded with people, compact and tight, or whenever there's a chase or 'danger' kind of moment for Rosenberg, or just having to deal with large crowds or difficult lighting set-ups), the narrative thread gets tangled up. The opening shot of the people walking in slow-motion is brilliant, yet I didn't feel that same brilliance in the film.

Several directors hit this kind of moment in careers, where a larger-than-usual concept is provided by the appropriate budget. That it's in English is unusual, and though Bergman is functional in the language, one can tell there's not the same fluidity in the writing at times. However I don't discredit the Serpent's Egg as this horrible quagmire of a picture, as I was almost led on to believe. It still contains some extraordinary stuff, like the Cabaret scenes, as weird and compelling as some of the stuff in the Silence. Or the terror instilled when Heinz Bennent's character shows Rosenberg the 'footage' towards the end of the film. But it's also one of the more difficult films of Bergman's I've seen, that moves at a pace that's post-modern, and not too steeped in the 20's (that is one of its strong points at times in theme), while resisting going for the easy, Hollywood big-budget kind of movie-making. 7.5/10

The film is interesting, of course -it tells about the rise of Nazi power. But this is the less "bergmanian" film of Ingmar Bergman. It's not an intimate portrait of people -as the Swedish director always does. Here we have a big budget movie, with many actors... Although the presence of Liv Ullmann, Bergman loses his targets. On one side he wants to analyze a period, on the other one he has to follow more mainstream rules -because he works for a big budget production. As a result he "fails" (it's a big word) in both things -although the film is not a failure.

We feel Ingmar Bergman is not really at ease. This is not his natural dimension -he's a super director because he has an extraordinary ability of understanding neurosis and anxieties, his favorite context are the relationships among a few people. In "The Serpent's Egg" these trademark are really minor.

The title, The Serpent's Egg, had me wondering for a moment until I realized that it did not refer to the the Doctor and his bizarre experiments nor to Abel and his misery, but to the encapsulated Germany of the 1920s and the environment that led to Hitler's ascent in the 1930s. That is, Germany being the 'egg', Hitler and the Nazis as the 'Serpent', and the environment as the embryo of the egg.

In many ways, this is a cynical film, in that it attempts to show that degradation, fear and loss of life and livelihood is sometimes stronger than humanity and even love. Isn't this true about Germany in the 1920s, and other nations at other times as well? We only have to look at ourselves after the attacks of 9/11 to see a time when fear overcame reason. Fear allowed us to meekly accept the chipping away of our own civil rights and privacy, and also government sponsored torture.

It also gives us a glimpse at one of Hitler's truisms, which is that if he could have a person at age 7, then that person would be a Nazi for life. The experimenting Doctor re-states this in his observations that the sons and daughters of the defeated German populace will be the ones who create the new German society, of which he already is a part with his inhumane human experiments.

Of course, all this is done with hindsight, so how can it be wrong? It can't, but then it's still a good review of a period in Germany that many Americans know nothing about, and should learn if they want the answers to the question of how Naziism came to be. It wasn't just some sort of aberration never seen in history before nor repeated.