A Palavra

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.

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.

Others have reviewed this picture in a more scholarly and contextual manner than I can, so I will only endeavor to add the following:

I have a particular interest in the nature of faith, and undertook to view Ordet as something "good for me," but probably arduous. Wrong! I also grew up in an area heavily populated by Scandinavians, and knew immigrants who were contemporaries of the oldest characters in the picture.

Ordet, set in 1925, is a dead-on take of old-school Scandinavian culture, suffused with both the most intense dramatic elements imaginable and moments of comic relief as well. The action moves right along without help of special effects or a distracting musical score.

This picture at least alludes to the seldom-asked question, "Why do people believe?" Is it merely for the rewards of faithfulness, or something more?

The final scene, utterly devoid of effects or music, has a dramatic power unexcelled in the ensuing 47 years of cinema to date. It is very long, but uses its duration in service of the tension of the story. Nobody is yelling, fighting or firing weapons, despite the fact they are enduring emotional torment that is as painful as it gets.

In an oblique way, the scene reminded me of the part of Jim Jarmusch's "Down By Law" where Tom Waits and Co. are sitting in the clink in real time, and time passes glacially in one very long scene, illustrating the sheer boredom of incarcerated life. Here real time is used to illustrate the unrelenting nature of grief. In both cases we see what happens long after the scene would have changed in nearly any other picture. The pace conforms plausibly with real life, and in so doing serves the dramatic tension.

One negative review alludes to the final shot and the expression in a character's eyes. I would defend that as an insight that no blessing is unmixed.

As others have noted, one needn't hold a Christian point of view to enjoy this film and be given much to ponder. See it.

Well, I grew up in a religious home, and I was religious until around 22. I've been an atheist since then, and I had a very hard struggle to leave the religious world. I generally have very little patience with people who really believe in God and other such nonsense and fairy tales. But this film left me breathless, and I don't know why. Interestingly enough, when I heard all the quotes that Windfoot mentions, I wasn't very impressed with them, because they are all basically platitudes, trite expressions and homilies that every kid learns to parrot, religious or not. I felt that all those commonplace ideas like goodness, and kindness, and ethics are ordinary human values, which even a person who is not religious believes. But miracles, revelation, and such are, of course, completely different. The ending of the film was so affecting to me. Partly I think it is because the direction and stylization of the miracle is so honest and unencumbered by the juvenile and silly "special effects" that we have come to expect so often. The way that Dreyer presents the lives of these people--simple, honest, genuine, is so different from most everything we see today. True--there was primitive inhumanity displayed, in the refusal of both fathers to agree to a genuine love match between their children. This was very upsetting. All I could think was--"What would Jesus Christ have said to these two old unfeeling men, who were refusing to allow their children to marry--in the name of a religion based supposedly on love??" Only after Inger dies do they both realize how important love is, in a world callous and unfeeling. The film could conceivably have ended at that point, and it would have been a beautiful, albeit somewhat hackneyed story. Don't forget that the point of the miracle is to illustrate what Johannes (John) claims: That everyone there claims they are religious, but they don't really believe. If they would, they could bring Inger back to life. I am rambling....I really do not understand why this film had such an impact on me. I think it took courage for a filmmaker to go the way he did. Everyone, I suspect, would be tempted to laugh at the ending. I honestly don't know why I didn't. Maybe because it was presented so honestly, without all the trappings of wealth and power that accompany most religious culture, whether Jewish or Christian. But I do think that the film must have a very different meaning for someone who is really religious, believes in God, from the one it had for me. I'm still thinking about what it meant for me, and trying to figure it out. I just saw the film for the first time (Thank you, TCM). More comments maybe later.

First, I must say I don't write in English very well. I study English, a little bit, in the school. I speak and write usually in Spanish and Basque. Well, I think this is one of the best movies I've ever seen. Johannes is a magnificent character and two scenes with Johannes and his nephew, talking about nephew's mother... are great. The story is about life, dead, love, faith and a lot of "people's problems" At the end, is a story about the meaning of life. I like movies. Love stories, westerns, "film noir", adventures films... but occasionally you can see a movie like this that makes you love this art too much. You're not seeing a film, you're living the film. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.