© 2019 by James Clark
I kicked off the Bergman trilogy comprising the films, Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1969) and The Passion of Anna (1969), by way of Shame. But one could start anywhere here, inasmuch as all three of them represent a steep ascent toward—not the famous “silence of God”—but the long-hidden finality of death as tempering the farce of advantage. There was the attraction, in Shame, for its fulsome violence and its unspoken (forgotten) heresy, buried by a world-history crazily intent upon becoming iconic, even if tiny.
We’ll pick up from there, by another very humbled figure, namely, Alma, the wife of a rather well-known and admired painter, Johan Borg, in the film, Hour of the Wolf. Unlike the forgetting of that unfamiliar reflection, in Shame, Alma has incorporated a degree of disinterestedness being the gem of the aforementioned film. But, like Eva-the-forgetful, Alma, remarkably warm though she could be, there was about her a striking inefficiency, a decorative tip of an iceberg—while the full accomplishment remained a huge oblivion. Whereas the opening of Shame adopted an almost sit-com miasma, here instead, what we experience, and yet being far from the depths of creative magic and profound joy, is a punishing, but soft, third-degree. “Listen, we’re not quite finished yet… No? Alright…”
“Alright” takes off with Alma’s telling the camera and us, in flashback, of the shocking death of Johan; and her inability to keep him in one piece. She begins by emerging from her thatch-roofed, wood-framed cottage, with head bowed and tired eyes. Having already made to the world the details of her telling, this would be an investigatory journalist’s follow-up, in hopes that the disaster could provide more cogency. “I’ve given you the diary. And you wonder why I choose to stay here? We’ve lived in this house almost seven years. Come winter, I can come to the mainland, work at the store as I have done when money was short. The baby is due in a month. The doctor examined me in May, before the very last time we came out here. We’d planned to stay here until August. We were going to be completely alone… He was afraid… He liked that I was quiet…” Then, on the heels of that jumble of tenses, she abruptly delineates (in flash-back), how they had commissioned a small power boat and driven to their island hideaway. The arrival is shown to be touched by murky light not without a harsh beauty. This positive moment links to the boat of death, in Shame. Ebb and flow of engaging challenge. “We found a wheelbarrow in a shed on the beach. When we got here, we were happy to see the apple tree in bloom. Then we discovered footprints under the kitchen window in the flower bed, but forgot it.” (Long pause, in which the investigator could begin to discern that the quiet ones are also stupid ones.) “Yes, we were happy… Johan was uneasy.” (What sort of logic do they subscribe to? Probably a logic not far from that of Eva and Jan, in Shame.) “He always grew anxious when his work did not go well, and it had not gone well for some time now.” (The same precious and unscrupulous aesthetic, from the violinists’, in Shame?) “And he became sleepless. He was frightened, as if he was afraid of the dark. It had gotten worse in the last few years.” The decisive prow of the thrust of Johan and Alma’s boat brings to the story a baseline of decisiveness which awaits them, and all of us. Johan launches the returning driver with clear-enough decisiveness. He gathers his baggage—including, many frames waiting for successful performances—and grimly moves a pushcart to the cottage over very difficult terrain. In the arrival with its delight in the apple tree, she rushes to embrace Johan wholeheartedly; and receives a half-hearted buss and then a brush-off as he heads indoors distractedly and with a sour visage. Next day, he proposes drawing her; and the precious, nineteen-century proceedings seem to lack the promise of shoring up a tired routine. The white sheets blowing wildly on the line near the exercise to shake things up loom as an embarrassment and a warning. Was the second investigation alert to such matters?
This second cinematic rendition of the lost arts’ “giant,” for the sake of a more candid portraiture of the marriage and the mystery whose highlight brings us an Alma—a name for a circus performer whose highlight was to, briefly, invade the realm of Aphrodite, goddess of love whereby carnal mortals, in the Bergman film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), make short-shrift of her reign—alarmingly squelched by the hardness of existence. That night, she’s seen sewing far into the night, a process of mending, becoming a confluence. While she stays with her largely mundane priorities, Johan (a name involving the great musician, Johan Bach, and the uncanny dynamics of music) falls prey to incoherence, stalking about the room and feeling driven to reveal to her and her rendition of coherence the grotesque apparitions which haunt him in dreams and in waking, and which have become the staple of his productions, seemingly unloved and unsellable. (That he may once have concentrated upon the tried and true of a widely popular style of work, may account for his not attracting attention, until now, from the neighbors.) Not content to merely bring to Alma’s attention the disturbing work (never seen), he flogs each piece into her face as he carries out a running commentary brimming of both his supposed great struggle and great fear. “Now look! I haven’t shown them to anyone!… This is the one who turns up most often. And he’s almost harmless. I think he’s homosexual… And then there’s the old lady, the one always threatening to take off her hat. Do you know what happens if she does? Her face comes off, you see…” On to his piece de resistance, “He’s the worst of the lot. I call him Bird Man… He’s so strangely quick… and he’s related to Papageno of [Mozart’s 1790 opera] The Magic Flute.” As Johan raves on—“…and especially the Spider Man” [Bergman’s 1960 film, Through a Glass Darkly, features a protagonist who becomes convinced that God is a giant spider]—Alma becomes appalled at his grotesque researches, closing her eyes being all she can do.
In a sort of rally, she manages to put aside the aesthetic output in favor of attempting to assuage the insomnia which the ugly visions have produced for him, visions of horrors he prefers, over facing beauties without personal eternity. (As we are about to discover, it’s even more complicated than that.) He demands, “You must stay awake a little while longer…” Alma, a study in contrast, looks into the kerosene lamp and now her eyes are open and clear. He covers his face with his hand, and she resumes, on a steady keel, that modest and promising play upon thread. In contrast, his insomnia and violent rudeness (to come), being traceable to fear of death, the investigation more closely coincides (sews with) the problematic militancy of Shame. Before the night is over, Johan provides to the multiplicity of scrutiny a display of his obsession. “A minute is actually an immense span of time… Wait, here it starts…” Alma draws much closer to this matter than she did about the grotesque figures. “Ten seconds,” he gazes at the watch. She infers where this is going, and she doesn’t like it. “These seconds… you see how long they last? The minute isn’t over yet!… Ah, finally… It’s gone now…” Feeling some kind of poison (plague) in the works, she returns to her sewing (now small accomplishment, in the dark atmosphere. “Say something,” he demands. “Talk to me, Alma…” Changing the deadly subject, she brightens up. “Hey, you, there’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. Are you listening? [his head has been bent over his chest]. We’ve lived together for seven years now… No, that’s not what I was going to say… Now, I know. Isn’t it true that old people who have lived for a lifetime together start to resemble each other? They finally share so much, their faces take on the same expression. What do you think that is?” Getting him to rise to this bid would be miraculous. But Alma does have a theory which, though unimpressive from the point of real delivery, shows us that her heart is bent on the right part of that cosmos miraculously responsive to loving courage from a finite sensibility. “I hope we will get so old that we think each other’s thoughts… and we get little, dried up, identical wrinkled faces…” (“Identical,” being a hopefully possible way of overcoming his cowardice, selfishness and coldness.) “What do you think about that?” (He’s sleeping, just as Albert, the ringmaster, was sleeping through the story of the hell-on-wheels Alma who reached so high that she became an instance of Aphrodite herself. Our Alma here, however, becomes more a person of interest in her gentle weaknesses, than in her fumbling strengths.)
That much said, let’s, however, get fully involved with the rest of the island, in its capacity to reveal how bad things can become, and thereby posit energies Alma cannot muster. The bright morning, following the long, dark night, shows her taking out to the yard their stale white sheets and being addressed by a woman in white, a very elderly woman, the likes of which has been seen in many previous Bergman investigations, where only an oracle can get to the bottom of what’s going on—which is to say, a mortal having, like the first Alma, brought to bear by her courage and wit and grace, a possessor of a rare vision and feeling. Her gambit is, “Can you feel my hand now, my fingers, the veins under my skin?” (That being a similar gambit by Jacobi, the murderous mayor and expert on texture that opens doors, in Shame.) Then she announces she’s 216 years old [quickly amending, and unconvincing, to 76]. Not only does she enjoy a remarkable (but not immortal) age, but she has such a closeness to the ways of Aphrodite that she transmits to worthies, like Alma, how factors of a power, paradoxically indebted to resolved mortals, can be put within apprehension which might result in furtherance of becoming aware of needing a warrior dimension as well as a that of a remarkable care-giver. As with Alma’s almost forgetting the gift (a half-gift, in fact) about a brave spouse lifting the spirit of a cowardly spouse, the uncanny stranger almost forgets to impart that Johan’s diary, under their bed, is must reading! On the somewhat soulmate’s departure, the younger sewer is seen from a pedestrian distance and optics which hobbles her as a candidate for audacious deeds. She gets only as far into Johan’s diary (presented by voice-over), as, “I have recently been ill. Not seriously, but unpleasant enough…” Then we cut to the diarist/ painter (an event already recorded in the first investigation; but open to more deep revelation), at work along the shore being interrupted by the owner of the island, Baron von Merkens, also owner of an ancient castle there (a devout soulmate of Knight Augustus Block, in The Seventh Seal) and also demonstrating an extremely pious side, far less benign than that ancient aristocrat. “Would you and your wife care to join us for a simple family supper?” (Words like “simple,” “family,” and “supper,” being implicit weapons, in the range of a non-simple stranger.) Going through tortures—as yet metaphorical—from this worst luck for a solitary soul, he conventionally replies, “That’s kind of you…” “It will be very simple [or, does that term mean, crude]. But I’ll give you a good wine. And our salmon fishing is renowned [crushing; and hooked?]. I should also say that my wife and I are among your admirers, your… fondest admirers…” [eliciting wild excitement].
That shot in the dark, as thus under arrest (Jan, in the film, Shame, often chooses to hide when anyone comes his way), becomes supplemented by the further reading of Alma’s discoveries from the diary. Near the area where he was ordered to face the [simple] music of the castle, he becomes interrupted by a woman, Veronica Vogler, whom he had been very intimate with for years without Alma’s awareness. She had interrupted the painter’s tantrum in realizing that the work had lost its depths. The striking approach of her liaison—her legs entering the upper area of the frame and then her full and impressive blonde attractiveness—becomes an ironic vignette, in light of the rather witless follow-up. (Moreover, the lust on that second look would infiltrate a fuller phenomenality for the sake of delving into the qualities—pro and con—of the experience.) “Do you see this mark?” she indicates, over her right nipple, where she had exposed that breast. “Be more careful, my love, or it will end in disaster [another implicit warning]. Don’t you remember? I was leaving for a party, and I was wearing my green brocade dress. Afterwards, I had such trouble putting my hair up again. And then I forgot my gloves… I have something I must speak to you about… I’ve received a letter that I must show you. It was sent yesterday: ‘You do not see us, but we see you. The most terrible things can happen. Dreams can become unveiled. The end is near. The wells will run dry; and other fluids will moisten your white loins. This is decided…’ I almost became ill reading it.” (She emits a little laugh in being fondled—the machinery of his imminent murder beyond his grasp.) “Be so kind as to help me with the zipper of my dress…” (Alma is seen reading this with deadened eyes.) In another entry of Johan’s waywardness, he is, while on a walk, waylaid by an intellectual, in suit and tie, who is well aware of the artist’s career. So persistently garrulous is this stranger, that Johan eventually smashes him in the face, bleeding his nose. (The prelude to this blow-up, entails the pest’s rather cutting harangue, “This place must be a painter’s dream or what? I’ve lived here for quite a while [in the castle, as we’ll soon discover]. One returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, and commits new crimes!… At your age, a certain caution is to be advised… My name is Heerbrand, psychiatric curator… I finger people’s souls and turn their insides out.”) That both Veronica and the pedant are delivering a warning that the floundering radical has engendered a murderous trap, would take a more balanced sensualist to discern. (The Swedish welfare state might be in play here, insomuch as a degree of free thinking could involve a secure tolerance for unconventional ways. Pointedly, I think, the locale is a German island—Germany having a history of intolerance regarding innovative points of view. That a rigorous comportment in face of a skittish normality is urgent, constitutes the essence of this film.)
Welfare-state laissez-faire could be an ingredient in the situation that Alma (lacking the critical fire of the earlier Alma) quite readily puts aside the evidence of her not being a large part of his life, in order to sustain a saintly solicitude transcending the marriage. She’s prepared soup, a bit of everything, and pours it. He spikes his lunch with strong alcohol, and she produces a lengthy report of what she has to buy for their immediate sustenance. “What you gave me this month is almost gone.” (Bergman’s wit always reliable.) He quickly hands over everything in his pocket, but she wants him to hear the details of the shopping to come. “Don’t just shovel over money like that. You have to look at my accounting.” (Is the litany to come—e.g., “You need a new toothbrush. The one you have looks horrible…”—a subtle rejoinder, from a tepid player?) During the lunch Johan devours many slices of bread, as if Scrooge himself were transacting with a generous server. Another itemization is, “Then 50 Kronor for your boy’s birthday.” Eventually he tells her of the simple family supper, on Friday. “I know,” she says. “How did you know that?” he asks. She leaves the table.
From the perspective of von Merkens, this taking custody of our protagonists would be like apprehending elusive desperadoes. The swirl of the initial entry, with hosts, relatives and Germanically academic hangers-on in finery, exchanging pleasantries, recalls, vaguely, the networking parties thrown by Fellini and Antonioni. But, after the shuffle in the greenery, we are confronted with a huge table of food and drink (almost a lab) and massive candelabra ablaze (here recalling the oracle’s dinner, in Smiles of a Summer Night [1955], and her graceful confrontation of a pack of wolves being her daughter’s friends). Alma is virtually invisible amidst the forces making much of their financial wealth and crude audacity. Johan, though he doesn’t faint under pressure, like Jan, in Shame, presents a picture of agony. The host, as if in a signal to attack, prates, “I’m completely incapable of feeling aggression.” Promptly after that, someone (the camera catching diners with confusing close-ups, snippets of seeming monstrous parts of faces and hair) calls out, ironically, “Here we’re used to humiliation. We find it pleasurable, our fangs have remained intact…” Ernst, von Merkens’ brother, relates, “I once bought a painting from a well-known artist and invited him over, along with a lot of people who appreciated a good joke! Then I hung it upside down. What a laugh we had then! My God, how we laughed… What do you say, Sir Artist? Wasn’t that a fine joke?” (In Shame, Jacobi, the militant mayor, roughs up violinist Jan, in a similar way. But Jan eventually gets to shoot Jacobi dead. Here something else occurs. But the animus is worth placing often.) The “family” cruelly laughs out loud, causing Johan to barely swallow his salmon. Panning to Alma finds her in shock. Ernst continues: “… the sores never heal, the puss never ceases to flow. The infection is constant—worse, faster, or slower toward the end. The resistance of the heart decides the outcome…” A lunging pan from that to Johan discloses him close to tears, in having fallen into a trap (a trap, in fact, very hard to circumvent, particularly in view of his chronic weaknesses).
The next stage of “the simple family supper” clearly discloses the heart of the core of the venom. It begins with the hostess’ worry that she’s “constantly losing weight [dying of cancer]…I travel the world over, consulting specialists…” (Johan’s losing credibility is also a mystery of sorts being reversible.) “Sometimes the loss just stops,” she rattles on, “as it did this summer, but then it starts again. My husband thinks its psychological… that it all began when we lost our money. I embezzled the family fortune!” (The dynamics of the coverage of the speakers represents the crucial acrobatics for which the party is missing in action.) Such operatic sensationalism continues as if an overture to the explosive climax. The ruler’s mother exclaims, “I am an old hag. There must be a limit to the hurt.” Someone replies, “No, Madame Countess, I have never heard of any limits at all!” The Countess then pulls her serviette taut and chews on it. Then the subject of Veronica Vogler hits the fan—“I understand you know her. And very well, after what I’ve heard…” The host, who had spoken those words, turns to Alma and asks, “Have you also met her?” In close-up she replies, “No,” and her face is a mixture of hurt and anger and hopelessness. The conversationalist then taunts, “Such hatred in those eyes!” This promptly, militarily, elicits a chorus of harsh laughter. Johan, now onscreen, drinks his good wine without pleasure. The perspective shows three candle flames at his chest, like medals, being what he ironically might have deserved. Someone shouts out, over the carnivorous mirth, “Fredrik, the cacti you planted need to go. I mean, I don’t enjoy them at all.” Pan back to Johan, who has lost a medal of flame. He covers his face with his white serviette. Now the flames have left his chest. He desperately pours more wine. “Actually,” someone remarks, “I am allergic to them” [that is to say, not cacti but efforts to maintain an austere carnal equilibrium and its sensual medium, which the smart money has not only neglected but put a bounty on]. Johan’s flames are off the grid; but, over his shoulders, there are the King and Queen chess figures. Count Block, in The Seventh Seal, had become famous, in that dimension of the film world having an attention span, for challenging Death to a chess match, by which he hoped to be rewarded in the form of immortality. Hold that thought!
After so much spleen in the dining room air, the coffee moment—in the library—might have been expected to ease up. But the sugar on the run was to be the piece de resistance, the drama’s dark resolution. A small prelude of this stage of this world war entails the hypochondriac hostess, at the departure from the table, eclipsing the King feature. Also, there is pedant Ernst putting a non-solicitous hand on Johan’s shoulder, and Sir Artist pushing him away, an infraction causing the wag to become livid. Johan covers his face with his hand, sensing a difficulty to come. He comes up to Alma, still seated. “Help me a little,” he asks. “Yes,” she says. Unprepared for the wolf pack (some also their landlords), there would be some tentativeness; but we remain aghast at the passivity of our protagonists, as if chided for being kinky serfs in the 12th century. (Such a thrombosis also surprises us in watching Shame, where supposed professional violinists, Eve and Jan, losing their position, behave like trailer trash.)
Our two today drag themselves to more abuse, in a precinct of literacy, classical rationalism in all its wits. And though the spotlight falls upon a bemusing puppet stage, don’t be fooled for a second that brass knuckle attack could not coincide with rationality. Soon, after the guests of honor are placed, the lights are extinguished for the sake of a deadly clarity. Performance being a raison d’etre here, the little stage also becomes an altar, with a series of candles to light—the formulaic nature of the distribution being cemented, in contrast with the variable candle flames haunting Sir Artist. That the showman, being one of those experts the castle can’t do without, resembles old-time Hollywood boo, Bella Lugosi, dovetails with the same cheesy hard sell as the fanatical armies in Shame. The master of ceremonies orders, “Music”—unaware that that word covers the logic of his most lethal nightmare. The opened curtain discloses an ancient battlement, with a puppet on a string sidestepping to center stage (perhaps in hopes of sidestepping something that doesn’t agree with him). An operatic baritone, singing in Italian, begins his aria, and the residents produce a warm applause. The camera cuts to the anxious, cigarette-smoking hostess, rivetted to the supposed bravery of the saga. Then we see the grandmother—the host-couple having salted away their children in prestigious schools—galvanized by the sermon-to-come. Another takes off his glasses to meet the forces being evoked. We see Alma, in close-up, struck by the wholesale fascination. Pan to Johan, sweating, morose and looking down to the floor. A cut to the puppeteer produces a close-up of stark lighting on his face and an auxiliary, large shadow of a mouth on his chin. Despite the complexity of the story of the destruction of the Queen of the Night, Bella comes through with some easy listening. “The Magic Flute is the greatest example. [He blows out all the candles but two.] Tamino’s guards have just left him in the dark courtyard outside the Temple of Wisdom. The young man cries in deepest despair, ‘Oh, eternal night, when might shalt thou pass? When shall the light find my eyes?’ The fatally ill Mozart secretly emphasizes these words. And the reply from the chorus and orchestra is also, ‘Soon, soon, youth… or never.’ The most beautiful, the most shattering music ever written. [The puppeteer’s teeth resemble fangs. Cut to the target, Johan and his problematic troubles.] Tamino asks, ‘Is Pamina still alive? [An ancient angel comes to light.] The invisible chorus answers, ‘Pamina, Pamina is still alive.’ Hear the strange and illogical but genial rhythm… Pami… na! This is no longer the name of a young woman… but an incantation, a sorcerer’s formula… But still the highest manifestation of art… Would you not agree, Sir Artist?”
A swift swing pan puts the victim on the spot. A pan to Alma finds her very worried, not able to “help a little” in finessing past a murder. Johan, the born and reckless iconoclast, replies (as they knew he would), “Pardon me. There is nothing self-evident in my creative work, except the compulsion to do it. Through no intent of my own [that last phrase being a half-truth thought to be clever]. I have been pointed out as something apart, a five-legged calf, a monster. I have never sought for that position, nor do so now to keep it. Yet I may well at times have felt the winds of megalomania sweep across my brow. [Alma tense in his apologia, missing the point of his execution.] But I believe myself to be immune. I need only for one second remind myself of the unimportance of art in the human world in order to cool myself down again. But that does not mean the compulsion does not remain…”
Here we’ve just been granted a gift of the high skill of theatrical drama which Bergman often deploys to penetrate a consciousness so salient and so readily missed, at the heart of not merely human history but the history of everything, being an acrobatic and juggling dare which initiates and interplays significantly the uncanniness of life itself. Of course Johan is murdered for his annoying and incomplete nerve in the Gestapo snake pit. And of course Alma comes to reveal to the interviewer how lacking in substance her loyalty amounts to. But the uniqueness of this film—as sharing with the films, Shame and The Passion of Anna—comprises depth of challenge in the mine field of freedom. With respectability on the basis of living forever (full-bore or largely hidden) becoming more pathological by the day, the challenge of the completely new presses up upon Bergman and upon us, in such a way that it is a certainty that very few will take the dare.
The blitzkrieg of the puppet show and Johan’s faux pas, stirs up a gush of faux congratulation. “So speaks a true artist. This is a real confession. Magnificent! What courage! What clarity! I suggest we raise our glasses to our artist—not only a genius but a thinker, too! I’ll be damned, I never would have suspected. A flowering rose for your hair.” (Johan’s drink seems to be bitter to him.) The grandmother, bedecked by an arsenal of rings, broaches, bracelets and sharp fingernails, seeming to embrace the rebel, manages to cut open some facial skin and shed some blood on the prey of the wolf pack. “Our artist is wounded! I’m so clumsy!” Alma rushes to him, tells him to stay calm and tells him he’s had too much to drink. The wolves laugh. She brings him outside for some fresh air; and they’re followed closely. The expert he recently bloodied now goes on an offensive we needn’t pay any attention to. The sense of the saga has run its course. And the dilemma of flourishing there stands powerfully in our face.
Inasmuch as the brutes prefer a long and playful kill, there are reams of bemusement. We’ll keep it short. The artist family shows us how pitifully unprepared, for the phenomena of creativity, they are. The hostess needles Alma about Veronica; and, finally leaving the roast, she has no heart to delight in the inspiring seascape path and supernal moonlight. Instead, she announces that she has read the diary. “It makes me sick with fear… But if you think I’m going to run away, I won’t!” Back at their disappearing house and home, Johan pulls up a supposedly profound idea that an “hour of the wolf,” in the dead of night, involves fateful truths. “The old people” [like him] swear by it. Then he’s on to the subject of abuses from his parents when he was a child, and finding solace from his mother’s “forgiveness.” As if the beatific current, with its caressing, were to be freshly in play, he finds himself able to tell Alma about an abuse he inflicted by this coast not long ago, beating a rude young boy to death by means of multiple pounding with a large rock. (Quentin Tarantino, definitely an aficionado of this work, deploys, acrobatic stuntman, Cliff, in his film, Once upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), to frequently beat to a pulp annoying entities of every description.) Feeling that tempering would make an improvement, Alma responds, “You said once that what you liked about me was that God made me in one piece, that I had whole feelings, whole thoughts. You said it was people like me… It sounded so lovely. I was wrong. I don’t understand anything. I don’t understand you. You’re nothing but frightened…” Soon after dawn, an emissary from the castle proffers a handgun, supposedly to control wild predators. A second invitation is given, with the added attraction being Veronica. Alma takes umbrage about that, and Johan fires a volley of shots from that security factor. (Prior to that, she insists, “I’ll stay.” Moreover her wounds are superficial, and she escapes; the dribble of the action revealing—for hopefully critical souls—a swing to Hollywood.) Johan, the supposed widower, returns to the fun house. Veronica is placed under a shroud; he takes the cloth away and caresses her, and then the height of love laughs in his face, as do the others. He delivers to his detractors the melodramatic challenge, “The mirror has been shattered. But what do the splinters reflect?” [We’d love to believe that the shake-up has allowed some sense of a mortal being instrumental of two ranges. But that seems to be beyond the forces here]. One of those who sneers is the oracle. She gives us a little clinic as to descending to cheapness. And she deconstructs herself into her constituent parts, as a display of matter being honored to die a spiritual death. An amusing moment in Johan’s pursuit of Veronica involves the latter’s lover, a priest, who, in a fit of jealousy, walks up a wall and then upside down, along the ceiling, like Fred Astaire, in Royal Wedding (1951). The proceedings of killing Johan in the swampy surround are far from royal. But Alma does, partly, raise the tone in her attempt to save a difficult relationship.
She tells us, and those closely tracking her and her misadventure, “I thought it best to follow him. He might harm himself.” She has a question to ask of the investigator (s) of the war. “Isn’t it true that when a woman has lived a long time with a man…she becomes like that man? Since she loves him, and tries to think like him… and see like him. They say that it can change a person. Is that why I began to see those ghosts? Or were they there anyway? I mean, if I’d loved him less could I have protected him better? Or was it that I didn’t love enough? Was that those ‘cannibals,’ as he called them? Was that why he came to grief? I thought I was so close to him. Sometimes he said he was close to me. One time he said it was certainty. If only I could have followed him all the time. There’s so much to keep pondering. So many questions, I don’t know which is which and I get completely…”