La Honte

It's anyone's guess how you would react, when the sky falls down and you're under an attack, with terror and torment knocking on the front door, once friends take up arms, aim their sights, waging war - experiences that should have been lost some years ago but seem to perpetuate more than ever these days.

Eva and Jan leave us under no illusion of how innocent people living ordinary lives the world over can change as they're drawn into the living nightmares of armed conflict. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman once again present us with characters from the imagination of Ingmar Bergman that exist in a world few of us would like to share, but the world of cinema lets us come close enough to get a feel.

I don't recall a film which so deftly shows the emotional destruction of war, as mirrored in one single marital relationship. The focus of the film is the union between Ullman and Von Sydow--the two are in every scene. Through the course of the film, they experience a role reversal--one has the strength of survival and the other is reduced to emotional escapism through dreams. Both will lose a measure of humanity, but one to a greater degree than the other. The characters and the viewer go through periods of fluctuation in regards to closeness--the camera pulls out and away, sound disappears, words are lost, only for the camera to return to painterly closeups of its facially expressive stars. The confusion and fluctuation may make this film hard for some viewers, but this is all purposeful under the master hand of Bergman. I think the use of a "fake" war makes the film timeless, as relevant today as ever before, and by focusing on the human relationship through war, makes the film relevant to everyone. The pair could be anyone. The film is not grounded in place or time, but rather in emotion. A unique and effective war film, unlike any other. Bergman's films are virtuosic in presenting human relationships--that he would bring this to a war film is masterful.

It's difficult to choose a representative film from the entire Ingmar Bergman's filmography. Each film deserves a comment because it's like a piece of art in its own.

I chose "Skammen" because I saw it recently and because I think the message -although being a 1968 film- is still valid. The subject is quite simple: a couple is surprised by war, which changes forever the existence of the two people. We can discover their real feelings and their real values.

We can find shame in more levels.

First, husband's shame for not being able of giving a child to his woman. He's also an extremely coward man in the first half of the movie, he feels shame also for that.

Second, wife's shame for not being a mother -she feels frustrated. She's shameful also because she has betrayed her man with an important man of their country's army.

Third. They both feel shame because they pretend being friends of this man, who saves them from tortures and jail. (They're actually accused of being traitors, in expressing other political opinions.) As a compensation, that man come to their home whenever he wants and take advantage of his position for becoming a woman's lover. The husband lets things going like this, it's the price he pays for a kind of freedom...

Fourth. Shameful is of course war and life during it.

Bergman makes a flawless movie, he studies people as they are. Without big budgets and huge sets. A simple film, deep, superbly photographed in black and white.

"Shame" ("Skammen") (Swedish, 1968): Definitely one of Ingmar Bergman's masterworks, with cinematography by Sven Nyquist (who did most of Bergman's, and some of Woody Allen's films). "Shame" is less symbolic than some of Bergman's works, and, an intense, psychological study of a married couple, Jan and Eva, (Max von Sydow & Liv Ullmann) who have their personal problems like anyone else, but suddenly find their otherwise quiet Swedish island life completely upset by a civil war. Faced with increasing losses and degradations, we watch them struggle not only against circumstances, but their own psyches. The number of "shames" depicted is huge. This story may have influenced Lina Wertmuller's film "Swept Away". Just a guess. "Shame" is an ULTIMATE in gorgeous b/w photography, and ugly psychological horror.

Bergman's Skammen is one of the most realistic depictions of war ever set to film. This is not an action film by any means, though the pacing is faster and there is most action than in most any other Bergman movie. Nor is this a romanticisation of war or patriotism, unlike most war movies. In fact, the gritty realism and the deliberate ambiguity of the character's loyalties has a very contemporary feel.

Skammen is a darkly lit movie, that should be watched at night, so as to let it work it's magic. Many of the effects are conveyed indirectly, but so effectively that some scenes compete in intensity to a contemporary, insanely huge budget film like Saving Private Ryan. Of course, the action in Skammen is on a much smaller scale but it is impressive none-the-less.

While the film-making style feels contemporary, the setting of the film feels timeless and placeless. The war-torn countryside, and even the yet intact provincial hamlet could be anywhere, any time. And this film is not so much about specific historical events, with specific names and dates, but about universal human reactions to adversity and chaos.

The acting in Skammen, though typically impressive from Ullman and Sydow, is not of primary importance in this film, unlike most other Bergman movies. Through much of the film they are spectators, much as we are. Bergman has the war imposed on them, and through them on the audience, and their reaction is perhaps what any of our reactions might be.

Highly recommended. 10/10