© 2018 by James Clark
Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Silence (1963), is generally understood to be part of a trilogy upon the issue of an absent God. Though it does raise affinities to the film, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), it also swarms with the discoveries of the decidedly non-sixties earlier films, The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960). Instead of packaging 3-packs like that, I think we’re well advised to notice that every one of his films (or every one of which marked his graduation from hack duties) deals with the same obsessive shock that world history has boarded a train going nowhere.
That the train going somewhere is far from transparent may be inferred by the fact that the most unlikeable figure, in The Silence, happens to be also the only one with a taste for integrity. This so-called person of interest, perhaps predictably, comes to us as totally upstaged by her sister, Ester, in the First-Class compartment of the train, they share, along with a boy, Johan, of about 10, whose mother, Anna, feeling the heat of the well-appointed but not air-conditioned cell, fans herself with a magazine. Ester does not feel that heat pressing upon her sister. She’s dressed in a tasteful suit, and she could be taken for a middle-management bureaucrat. But she feels heat nevertheless.
The nature of distribution of heat is as important as it is obscure; and it needs clear-sightedness on our part, a take going beyond the flabby pundits who slide off the rails in claiming that Ester has been stricken by a plague-like, devilish biological killer. She does have, several seconds into the first scene, some kind of fit, bending over and vomiting and needing Anna’s help to reach the washroom. But the irony of the very beautiful actress, Ingrid Thulin’s, vivid portrayal of Ester—forbidding the notion of her being eaten by microbes—never becomes a question. Anna, played by actress, Gunnil Lindblom, though having a handsome face, is overweight and has no taste in apparel. The credits have been accompanied by the loud and racing ticking of a clock. The moment of Ester’s cracking up had been accompanied by the pronounced rushing and ringing of the train. Johan had, in asking Ester the impossible question of what the signage in and out of the vehicle meant, underlined to the adults what it feels like to be visited by a range of action foreign and solidly indifferent to them. But perhaps it was the universe they had inhabited all their life. That the next station finds them stopping over to allow Ester to deal with her malaise, once again introduces a current of foreignness they seem very unprepared for.
Such an introduction as we have sketched might be the makings of moral theatre whereby the struggles of personas carry us to levels of enlightenment we can apply going forward. Bergman, the man of the theatre—by and large treating of the compositions of others—would be abreast of such destinations. But Bergman, the filmmaker, has a passion for something very different from bourgeois progressions. His concern being the essential chaos of impressively delivered steps of advantage, he would not look to the wonders of Platonic rationality; but instead the energies to be found in transcending those honorific golden miles of history. That is why, at the unscheduled stop, there is a hotel porter resembling—and contrasting with, in fascinating ways—the protagonist of Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953). We never learn why the fractious trio has ventured forth, but the Five Star hotel they choose marks them as affluent holidayers hoping (at various intensities) to find what they need in the way of mutual joy. (Ester’s forever working on her career of translations recalls the American businessman on the beach riveted to his transactions and—presciently—his phone. The add-on of her alcoholism and chain-smoking puts into play a strain stemming from that omnipresent “heat.” Anna’s flirtative ways represent a ramping up of the sedate wiles of the belle of the beach.)
We’ll get around to the porter in due time. But engaging our helmsman’s remarkable hybrid treatment of theatre/ film constitutions, we’ll try to clear up (as far as anything gets cleared up here) how the stinker sort of comes up roses. Going back to that stuffy, high-class dimension on-track, as meeting a promisingly sunny dawn, Anna drops her scowling to tend to her sister’s comfort. On rushing to the washroom, Ester rather harshly pushes the helper out of the way; but she allows Anna to bring her back after throwing up and place her across one side of the seating. On the other side, she hugs and consoles the bewildered child. This solicitude is the only instance of balanced traction we see from her, as she heads into a binge of desperate affection. With the gig shifting to a suite of rooms, as surrounded by a linguistic dead-end and a cultural hothouse never allowing departure for the sake of more than inertia, the focus is on Ester’s probity as letting her down, and the migration of Johan to his aunt’s priorities, not yet letting him down. When Anna does dislodge herself from the walls of the unwelcome hothouse it is to make her listeners feel uneasy. “Johan, come here and soak my back.” After soaking her back and neck while she sat nude in the bathtub, he leans on her neck in a nuzzling motion, a move that prompts her to say, “Thattle do…” Following that, she proposes, “We’re going to take a nap…” She beckons him to come close and she sprays a little perfume over him. They nap, with her nude, and him not. Johan is soon awake (wakened by a jet fighter going over) and getting into a train of various mischief; when Anna wakes, she washes her face and neck, accentuating her breasts. On the way out to resume the vacation, she meets resistance from her anxious sister; but she crashes though the imploring Angst, seen to be especially cruel in light of the gentle attentions of the total stranger in the form of the porter. At a bar, she encourages in several ways a waiter to come close. Proceeding to a kind of entertainment mall, in hipster shades, she makes her way through a dance club to enter a vaudeville theatre (in some ways her field of action), featuring acrobatic—that Bergmanesque live-wire—dwarfs. A couple copulating in seats nearby—a sort of rodeo—elicits for Anna no kinship. In fact she is so disconcerted that she drops her cigarette, something you won’t see Ester doing, piling up mounds of butts, in the confines of her workaholic nunnery. Once out on the sunny and congested streets the wanderer guardedly stalks men.
While Anna was on the lookout for real talent, there was a substantial passage where Ester not only rights her listing fears and anger—the writhing and gnashing her teeth, followed by, “This is humiliating! I won’t stand for it!”—but works toward making friends with the porter and Johan. “I must keep my head,” the lonely and lovely convalescent tells herself and tells us, as her catchment of mainstream power. “I’m known as a level-headed person… Dear God, please let me die at home! How stupid of me to drink on an empty stomach!” The porter brings some water, rubs her forehead with a cloth and takes away her sweat-tantrum soiled bedding. They enjoy being on the same page about the excellence of a composition on the radio by Johan Bach, with well-tempered dynamics, not on the board for M. Hulot. (A better way. But not well credited. On her own she’s briefly seduced by Hollywood schmaltz, and good-naturedly catches herself being tepid. Then she can’t desist from feeling superior in her choices.)
She invites Johan to share her dinner, chats about being home soon, and the boy draws a picture for her, concerning his being caught between a strange mother and a less strange aunt. The vortex of her presiding over factual securement, by way of the powers of words from all corners, shifts into high gear; and it is with that precinct of solidity that Anna is met on returning to the hotel she would never think of as a home away from home.
Thus commences the first of three set-piece dialogues blowing the hinges off the quasi-family in such a way as to radiate to the true, cinematic action situating this voyage as belonging amidst the stars. Despite her addictions, Ester (at least up to the small fit in the train) has been level-headed chic. The glimpse of Anna’s soiled dress after the “walk” would have amounted to a slam-dunk over the head of an undisciplined nobody. “That’s good,” she sneers, sniffing the discarded fabric. She drops the dress and saunters back to her work table, leaving Anna angry as never before. (With about to be fully deployed, her angry presence is seen in her bathroom mirror while her body is seen as a small portion of the back of her head.) She brushes her hair repeatedly and paces around her room. When she does confront her detractor, she begins in tandem with the soaring reflection of the mirror, not the caged beast. She asks, “What are you doing?” The intellectual, imagining classical rationalism about to return to the dynasty, replies, “Working, as you can see.” To this contemptuousness, Anna relocates as merely Anna. “Then mind your own business and don’t spy on me… To think I’ve been afraid of you!” Anna marches to her suite and Ester pounds on her typewriter. In close-up, her eyes show horror. Perhaps she’s in the throes of too much work to handle. Her mouth trembles and she grinds her teeth. There is a cut to her at the window, seeing for the second time the agitated crowds, almost weighted down with doom, and a horse-drawn wagon carrying furniture, what could be called props for a caravan of circus folks capable of going much farther than a traditionalist like Ester; or a traditionalist like Block, strutting his underwhelming stuff, in The Seventh Seal. Ester, the born leader, dictates, “Johan, step outside for a while. I want to talk to Anna alone.” She then, in dismissive—or is it dismissal—mode intones, “Where have you been?” Anna informs, “Out for a walk;” and hears, “That was a long walk.” The defendant remarks, “I didn’t want to come back here…” “Why not?” the stay-at-home wonders. “I didn’t feel like it,” she digs in for a clash. “You’re lying!” the self-styled judge fires back. “Do you want to know all the details?” the mirror-enhanced renegade asks. “Just answer my questions,” the haughty ascetic demands. Smashing the façade of an Inquisition, she dips into family history. “Remember that winter ten years ago, when we stayed with Father in Lyon? I had been out with Cloude [perhaps someone with range]. You interrogated me that time, too, Said you’d tell Father if I didn’t tell me everything in detail…” (Ester is suddenly distressed by this, her wheelhouse of factuality being a bomb, not a balm.) “I went to a cinema and sat in a box at the back. [Living in a box with a desk and questionable verbiage being Ester’s redoubt, whereby to extrapolate from fearful foreignness to that causal payoff of First Cause and its immortality which all the world of science and religion and good deeds approves and rewards.] A man and a woman made love right in front of me. When they were finished they left.” (This and other variant views of the matters of fact being optional for the sake of Bergman’s theatrical dialogue instilling the uncanny impulsiveness of canny intercourse.) “A man came in, someone I’d met at a bar. He sat down next to me and started stroking my thighs. Then we had intercourse on the floor. That’s how my dress got dirty…” “Is that true?” the startled arbiter of words asks. “Why would I lie?” the loved-one asks. Back on addressing the dock, Ester (whose name, historically, carries political power and striving for peaceful domesticity) intones, “Right, why would you?” [with such an elevated patrimony]. Anna then fires off, “It so happens I was lying. It doesn’t matter. I sat and watched that couple make love. Then I went to the bar and this server left with me. I didn’t know where to go, so we went into a church. We had intercourse in a dark corner behind some pillars. It was cool there…” Ester the ruler is seen with her head bowed. “I see,” she whispers. Anna moves ahead, with, “This time I’ll make sure I get my clothes off first.” With looks to kill, she orders, “Shouldn’t you go to bed.” With grief-stricken eyes, she asks Anna to sit on the edge of the bed, maneuvering her enemy into the role of a supplicant. She sits up and resumes, “Are you going to meet him? Please don’t! Not tonight! It’s such torment.” “Why is that?” Anna wants to know. “Because I feel humiliated… You mustn’t feel I’m jealous…” Ester kisses Anna’s cheek. Anna isn’t having any part of that non sequitur, “I have to go.” Then the ruler with so many devotees, being hooked on one stray lamb, makes a face reflexively troubled. Anna slams the door sharply.
As it happens, Anna opts to stay home, picking up a kitchen staffer in the hallway. Johan-the-dismissed, seen from above standing upon a posh carpet with a compass-like motif, takes the route to spot where his mother has ventured. Returning to the relative less-estranged than Anna, he finds her rallying and asking for him to read to her. Instead, he fetches up a pair of Punch and Judy hand puppets and stages a brawl with them. Having both been victims of Anna’s frightening industry, they forge an alliance of clever softness. His encountering various staffers and guests by shooting them with his cap pistol leads nowhere. But a final pot-shot of his, regarding Anna’s whereabouts, leads, Ester now a kind of social worker to supplement her mastery of civilization, to open a second front. The return of Ester kills quite a bit. But this is not one of those transparent melodramatic movies where you can satisfactorily pinpoint the good, the bad and the ugly. (A bit more to the point would be two bads and one ugly. Atop this melodramatic hissy-fit, there is the self-inflicted soap opera, beaming out the travesty from which neither of them is likely to surpass.)
We cut to Anna, yawning after what we can imagine being underwhelming. She does find some residual excitement, however, covering the experience in terms of, “How nice that we don’t understand each other.” She then adds, “I wish Ester were dead.” Being in the mood to tally up what a shithole her range of motion turns out to be, she recalls that sister she could, in fact, have dumped years ago. “What a glutton you are,” she says. “How fat you’ve gotten, lately. You need to go on a diet… I like food. So would she, if she didn’t drink so much…” The Queen intrudes: “I need to talk to you.” Anna shuts off the lights, and when Ester enters she turns on the table lamp by the bed and she and her date do their damnest to be shocking. “What have I done to deserve this?” she emotes. Anna, clutching at straws to make conversation, where she has already (vaguely) understood that keeping her mouth shut is the best policy, posits, “It’s just that you always harp on your principles, and drone on about how important everything is. But it’s all just hot air… You know why? I’ll tell you. Everything centers around your ego. You can’t live without feeling superior. That’s the truth. Everything has to be desperately important and meaningful… and goodness knows what…” [Precisely!]. The royal engineer counters, “How else are we to live?” Though Anna had never crossed the erudite voice-of-billions, she was on such a rampage that there were no speed bumps to steer elsewhere than massacre. “I used to think you were right. I tried to be like you, because I admired you. I didn’t realize you hated] me.” (Ester shakes her head.) “You always have. I just never realized it before.” “No,” Ester maintains, still holding to the register of a board room. “And in some way, you’re afraid of me.”/ “I’m not afraid of you” [you with no certification to challenge venerable satisfactions]. “I love you.” Somehow the inclusion of “love” in this collision is the last thing that could hold sway. Anna, therefore, appears to show some gusto in her refusal, “You always talk a lot about love.” In response, the pillar of society begins to sustain her fluency for love. “You can’t say…” the pedant chides; and the optically limp combatant reaches down to a secret weapon, albeit on the blink. Anna fiercely interjects, “What can’t I say? That Ester feels hatred? That’s just a silly idea of mine, right? You hate me, just like you hate yourself… Me, and everything that’s mine. You’re full of hate…” (Ester shakes her head.) “And all the fancy books you’ve translated. Can you answer me one thing? When Father died, you said, ‘I don’t want to go on living.’ So why are you still around? Is it for my sake? For Johan’s? For your work, perhaps?” Attempting to temper the murderousness, Ester reasons, “It’s not like you say… I’m sure you’ve got it all wrong…” That gambit, with its trusty rapier propelled by years of stocking up factoids, only adds fuel to the flames. “Don’t use that tone of voice!” [redolent of willful contempt for the full spectrum of sensibility]. “Go away!” When Ester replies, “Poor Anna!” the latter erupts with, “Why don’t you shut up?” [not merely regarding the present exchange but the intellectual’s daily, smug quota of pointing out treasures of factual progress in hopes of burying the exigencies so terrifying as to deploy tons of drugs and tons of smarm]. Having driven the intruder from the inner sanctum, she initiates a clash of abdomens (knocking over the bed table and the lamp), shooting along first crazy laughter and then not entirely crazy tears. Though savoring her new audacity, which appears to be a timely advance, we might come to appreciate (by way of subsequent films here), that she, by her (far from perfect) powers, has been obliged to be the one to find confluences.
That Ester is quick to recover much of her cruising speed as a mainstream warden reaches us immediately after the last sustained conversation they will ever share. She steps out to the corridor and oversees the departure of that troupe of dwarfs. They salute her in various ways as they, too, disappear forever. That that step into (bogus) royalty doesn’t quite please her, is suggested by her next move, lying on the floor by the ensuite door like a penitent. After what we’ve seen of their bedrock warfare, you can be sure that that gesture can be relegated to a warm-up for a more fixed rut that keeps her carefully drunk. Anna tells her that she and Johan will be leaving on the 2 o’clock train. And when she’s finished providing that little list of translations for the language of the locals (all nuggets of nouns, with no verbs in sight) which the boy has become a fan of and goes on to beg her to provide a copy, while waiting for them to come back from lunch, she provides us with a disclosure to keep in mind. Her boozy voice-over goes like this. “Erectile tissue. It’s all a matter of erections and secretions. A confession before extreme unction. Semen smells nasty to me. I have a very keen sense of smell. And I stank like a rotten fish when I was fertilized. It’s optional.” The porter comes in, and while holding his head (as he kneels at her bedside like a trusted adviser—or, receiving blessing by a bishop), she speaks out to a world a bit more volatile than she knows. “I didn’t want to accept my wretched role. But now it’s too damn lonely. We try out attitudes and find them all worthless. The forces are too strong… the horrible forces. You need to watch your step among all the ghosts and memories. All this talk… There’s no need to discuss loneliness. It’s a waste of time… I’m feeling much better now, let me tell you. Do you know what my condition is called? Euphoria! It was the same with Father. He would laugh and joke! Then he looked at me : ‘Now it’s eternity, Ester,’ he said. He was so kind… Though he was such a big man. He weighed 440 pounds! I wish I’d seen the men who lifted his coffin [she being so distraught in face of death she didn’t show up]… I’m so tired…” (Convulsive distress comes out of somewhere.) “No, I don’t want to die like this! I don’t want to suffocate! Oh! That was horrible! Now I’m frightened! That scared me. That mustn’t happen again. (It happens again.) Where’s the doctor? Must I die all alone?” (The camera angle catches her upside-down in a slight elevation as she lies flat, in such a way as to find her visage grotesque.) “Mother. I’m ill! Mother, come help me! I’m so frightened… I don’t want to die!” (She covers her head with the sheet. This hysteria we must not pass by, without the reminder that, in Bergman’s filmic reckoning (seen already by us in several instances), succumbing to fear cheapens the world.)
The coda consists of a short shrift bereft of gracefulness. Ester fumes, “She’s been gone an hour, and she took the boy with her!” In the train toward home meaning more dead-ends, Johan takes Ester’s terminology seriously; and Anne dryly remarks, “Nice of her…”
Dead weight becomes the translator. But much craft has been devoted to lightness. Sven Nykvist’s cinematography finds, amidst the train and hotel, a play and player the two bads won’t rise to and the only ugly fumbles like an inept acrobat and juggler. While the ladies melt in the heat, Johan finds, as far as his stolid register allows, mystery and adventure along the tracks—a kinetic forest he understandably underestimates. But we, the viewers, have no such excuse. The rolling stock along the line has been penetrated by shafts of morning sunrise. That flickering fireworks being roundly ignored constitutes a large part of who we are. Johan’s bored vigil does snap to another level of energy on encountering many flatbeds holding military tanks heading to a front they had departed, but not entirely. The hotel, with its high ceilings and marvelous chandeliers takes up the nudging in its play of shadows and sparkle (as far from 440 pounds of appalment as you can get). Once again, Johan, the truncated denizen of the pathways, sees the fun and weird and startling side but not the strong forces. He casts a large shadow-spook on a stair-well, seeing the freakishness and missing himself. There is an interlude when the boy plays hop-scotch on the tiles of Ester’s bedroom. That would not be enough to rise to the acrobatics essential in this outlook. Cap gun in hand, the killer of time shoots a janitor atop a ladder replacing bulbs on a glittering crystal chandelier. The workman plays along, giving out a disconcerting, squeaky dying sound. Along the way, both he and Ester plunge into their respective comforters on their bed, which afford billowy motions. Neither occasion marks a time of creative calm, but the boy’s body language picks up a little frisson, while the rabid researcher knows nothing but flatness and the optics of quicksand. As Anna blurts out her hopes for her sister’s demise, there is a quick cut to Johan gargling at a sink, sounding like a death rattle, which moves the venom to its farcical, unstable proportions. The waiter gives Anna a light, but both are so caught up in advantage the fire becomes a non-event. Similarly the vibes at the lounge are not only ignored by Anna but by all the others on hand. The smoke and fire-water Ester uses as inspiration and tranquility have exceeded their best-before. The porter, having evoked a battery of the vast and rare, subsides to occupying a cubbyhole. With some pathos (but no comedy) lingering from the model, he displays and gives to Johan a number of photos of a family celebration vaguely resembling the Last Supper. The gift also brings about a funeral, the white tablecloth doubling as a coffin. At the first opportunity, the boy ditches the photos under a carpet. Early on, Anna regards herself in a mirror. She remarks, without pleasure, “You’re quite tan…” Touched by the sun, but no more than skin-deep, she has no time for the tiny transformation. Bach speaks to Ester, as something superior to other tunes. But she has no heart for the heretical motions of that pillar of the Church. The porter is also touched by that same composition on the radio—quite a contrast from Hulot’s bouncy pop—but his being buried in gentle melancholy touches upon the exigencies of resilience being shied away from. During Anna’s exit for a second taste of the environment, Ester, as up to date as the nineteenth century, declaims, “Go, while your conscience lets you!” That preachy term has another, more vigorous function she will never know. Though eventually having Johan’s vote in the bag, Ester fusses about a slight tepidness in his devotion. “Mommy’s the only one who may touch you, isn’t she?” Mommy’s more than a bit careless. But she does have the wisdom to trust to touch.