Through a glass darkly

Instead of attending to my professional duties (I should write a text for a seminar) I just watched Through a glass darkly (Såsom i en spegel) for the second time. Quite a few of Bergman's films are, in my opinion, pretty amazing, but this one has not made a great impression on me, nor did I become more symphathetic towards it the second time around.

All right, the cinematoghraphy is great, the scenery is beautiful, and the actors are all right (Andersson/Björnstrand/von Sydow). But in contrast with Winter light (Nattvardsgästerna) I find the story too metaphorical, too far-fetched, too much of a construction. Young, scizophrenic girl, and her "encounter with god", combined with quirky relations with the other characters (incestuous relation with brother/older, "understanding" husband/asshole father who wants to utilize his daughter's illness in his quest for Great Art). Whereas the dialogues in Winter light, however serene & marked by particular film conventions of the time, felt real and relevant, in this film, it all seems too intellectual. The characters are mostly reduced to types, espially the character of the father, a self-obsessed writer, was really cardboard-y. The religious themes also felt much more like intellectual constructions than what was the case in Winter light. In both films, the question about divine love is explored, but in Through a glass darkly, I couldn't really even see how the different scenes were supposed to be interpeted at a metaphorical level (and I constantly felt that it was on that level the film was to be understood, which is not a problem as such). The ending of the film was particularly confusing, I simply couldn't make sense of it.

BTW: I watched a series of interviews by a Swedish journalist with Bergman a year or so ago, and one of the funniest parts (there were many! Bergman rocks! In terms of storytelling.) were the way he repudiated the lumping together of The Silence, Through a glass darkly and Winter light as his "trilogy about faith". 'That's just something I made up for the journalists' chuckled the old maestro.