Doktor Glas

An elderly, blind and haunted man - Dr. Glas - remembers back to his younger days when he tried to help a woman called Helga stuck in an unhappy marriage to the Reverend Gregorius. Filmed in atmospheric black and white and premiered in 1968 director Mai Zetterling's film adaptation of Hjalmar Soderberg's novel is an interior psychological drama of memory, imagination and fantasy, where 'life and dreams are mixed up'. It's also a thematically rich film dealing with issues including women's rights, so called 'conjugal rights', abortion, guilt, conscience, mortality, desires, the value of life, but perhaps (along with women's rights) more than anything an interrogation and sending up of religion. With skill, subtlety, nuance (traits of Zetterling as a director) and a certain amount of irony this is also a character study of Glas (played by one of Sweden's best actors in Per Oscarsson), as numerous thoughts and images flash into his mind (sometimes 'disturbing' but now and again amusing), which paint a portrait of him as a little misanthropic (his often negative thoughts include the 'dreadful sight' of a pregnant woman). And at the end the shadow on the ground is no more. Another impressive film from Zetterling.

This curious film is a clinical examination of a sexually repressed doctor in turn-of-the-century Sweden, and it is as cold and detached as its hero. Dr. Glas (Per Oscarsson) is an old man whose blurry, unhappy existence is plagued by sharply etched memories of the time in his past when he helped an attractive young woman kill her obnoxious husband. The flashbacks are interspersed with his sexual fantasy about that woman. Director Mai Zetterling's surgical style is visually effective, but too antiseptic to evoke much feeling.