Director: Ingmar Bergman
Cast: Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Max Von Sydow
Have I Seen it Before: I made a point of watching it when I was in high school, as I was in that phase when people (it might have just been me) aren’t really ready for the more important films of the world, but insist on watching them anyway. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) may have had something to do with it.
Did I Like It: It’s iconic qualities—again, see Bogus Journey—are hard to discount. It’s cinematography is stark and consistently interesting, even if it has a sort of almost-too-clean quality one might find in television productions over the next decade. Although, to be fair, that may be a byproduct of a trend in Blu Rays where the print becomes a bit too remastered for it’s own good. Thank God Bengt Ekerot wasn’t hiding a mustache under all that white make-up—a la Cesar Romero—or this film might have threatened to be fun.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? The film’s so aggressively self-serious that even in moments where there is comedy relief, it’s still a little bit about the weight of God and death. What’s more, the is a lot of road (well, at least 96 minutes of road) to get to the ultimate realization that hemming and hawing about the inevitability of death is a fool’s errand: death will still come and put you in checkmate. It’s such a self-apparent conclusion, that I was getting a little annoyed at the proceedings about three-fourths of the way in when I came to it. When, in its final moments, the film doubles down on my own perceptions, I wasn’t exactly sure why I had—for the second time in twenty years—gone through this exercise.
Maybe I need to give it another twenty years.