Gertrud is a peculiar film. I expected that. H said something to the effect that the film has an extreme feel of stage play to it. My expectations still turned out wrong. "Stage play" evokes uninteresting, self-indulgent stiff drama. Even though you might call Gertrud a stiff film - because in many ways it really is - it is really hard to call it a self-indulgent one. Some have criticized it for being Dreyer's self-congratulatory little film that celebrates himself as a Big Artist, but I'm not too sure. Several things in Gertrud really are theatrical. The locations, for example, are stripped down to the essentials. Very few are used. It sounds crazy, but the ending scene in Gertrud's apartment makes me think of the space ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey - the light may have something to do with that, too. A lit-up room, in which every object is focused on. As usual, in Dreyer's films, the interplay of light and shadows works brilliantly. The film is shot in black and white, beautifully so. In terms of cinematic effects, lots of things take place and in that sense, this is hardly a dry or stiff film. Visually, one may even call it an entertaining film. As one commentator points out, even the ways in which the characters sit expressively reveal many things about their emotions.
The dialogue is very stylized, every word is uttered with severe monotony. Nobody ever talks the way the characters do in this film, and the historical gap hardly changes anything; the interesting thing is that the story itself stands out all the clearer in light of this very stilted of dialogue. I'll explain.
Gertrud is married to a lawyer who is about to make a career in politics. Gertrud tells him she indends to leave him. He has, she says, never loved her; he has been too occupied with his work. (They allude to some old saying, that a woman loves her man while for the man work is always nr. 1) It turns out that Gertrud has a new lover, a young musician, Erland. But he doesn't care for her, either. He brags about his "conquest" at a "scandalous" party and she is ashamed. Gertrud & her husband visit a serene celebration party in honor of a poet, Gabriel. Gabriel has been Gertrud's lover, and he tries to convince her that they should get together again. She refuses him because she thinks Gabriel never really loved her. A fourth man, a psychologist/philosopher, convinces her to go to Paris, where he engages in weird psychological research. They are "friends", a friendship that, according to a dry & at the same time emotinally loaded remark by Axel himself, "never evolved into love".
This could have been a really cheesy story. And had my mood been different upon seeing the film, I might have sided with this critic, who mercilessly calls Dreyer's film trite and emotionless: "This film, in many ways, has far more in common, albeit unintendedly, with the zombie films of George Romero and his imitators than with Dreyer’s earlier great films- call it zombie formalism, of the sort that makes Dreyer have Gertrud dream of running naked, then being attacked by dogs, only to see a painting like that in the chamber where Gabriel is being honored by Gustav and others." (Contemporary critics are said to have been merciless, too.) Gertrud is a tedious film, and, by God, it's melodramatic - but interesting in that. The lines spoken by the actors are utterly demented. From another point of view, Dreyer attempts to achieve something by means of stylization. He creates an atmosphere, a perspective on the story.
After having watched the film, I had some difficulties in figuring out what the film was about. Gradually, it dawned on me that it explores idealized relationships. For one thing, while talking to each other, the characters rarely look at each other. They look straight into the camera. This adds to the feeling of how distant these people are in relation to each other. Gertrud is disappointed about the men in her life. Still, she celebrates Love. Paradoxically, she claims to have loved. Is it the idea of love she has cherished in her life? The other characters, too, are immersed in lives that seem to revolve more about an idea about themselves than relationships with other people. Gertrud's husband is keen to be seen as a decent citizen & successful husband. Gabriel, the poet, mourns the ways his life has changed. Erland, Gertrud's young lover, is interested in trying out women because he can - he knows that a safe future awaits him. Gertrud is an elusive character. She clearly expresses what she wants, but still it remains unclear what she actually wants.
Towards the end of the film, Gertrud sets for independence, but it is rather unsettled to what extent this is a happy independence. She has freed herself from something she didn't want, but what kind of freedom did she look for in the first place? What is Gertrud's conception of love? In one scene, Gertrud declares that love is "unhappiness". But maybe her idealized sense of love - the reason I call it "idealized" is not that I think that the alternative would be "to cope with the situation" - is a necessarily unhappy quest for purity? The austere ending of the movie in which Gertrud looks back on her life, in addition to her high-spirited speech on "free will" earlier on, makes me have double thoughts about her complacent, stoic feelings revealed towards the end of the movie (she states she is forgotten and alone...). Gertrud congratulates herself for having lived in accordance with the idea of love. It is difficult not to understand this as an utterly self-obsessed remark, cloaked in blown-up religious language.
For some reason, it is hard for me to understand Gertrud as a feminist movie about liberation and independence. I am not sure exactly how consciously Dreyer (or should we say Hjalmar Söderberg?) uses tired, old gender formulas: man seeks physical love & woman seeks Purity - man seeks artistic and/or social fulfillment & woman seeks Love. The characters transcend these stereotypes, I would say, to some extent.
But, really, this is a very open-ended film. I would not be surprised if somebody else were to interpret the film in a completely different way. And I am sure that I would watch it differently, were I to watch it a second time.
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