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Tilt down from a Gothic clock tower and pan across busy streets at night, a thin veneer of prosperity over the open wound of Germany Year Zero. "That's our experiment." Indiscretion of a German wife (Ingrid Bergman), a businesswoman guiltily having an affair with a musician (Kurt Kreuger). Her husband (Mathias Wieman) is an industrial chemist for whom life and death are lines fluctuating on a chart as rabbits get varying doses of toxins. Enter the blackmailer (Renate Mannhardt), stoking the woman's dread of exposure as part of the husband's plan to wring a confession out of her. Matrimonial therapy as scientific torment for the straying spouse as guinea pig. "Once you're on this treadmill, you can't get off." Nothing like a waning marriage to bridge the gap between neorealism and expressionism, thus the most richly unsettled of Roberto Rossellini's studies of Bergman. A murky landscape even in the couple's bucolic cottage, where the daughter caught in a lie becomes the inquisitorial target of the ex-Nazi in avuncular fishing gear. "One poison is an antidote to another." A ring missing at the opera house points up Cukor's Gaslight, a visit to the cabaret provides a glimpse of the very young Klaus Kinski. The double deception calls for a stalking camera, sustained closeups drain the heroine, as so often with Rossellini it's a matter of theorems made flesh. (There's a fascinating kinship with Preminger's Whirlpool.) "At this point, pain no longer matters." A stark noir melodrama, with a vast shadow looming in the corridor of the laboratory to acknowledge the homeland of Nosferatu. Commiseration with the caged rabbit, reconciliation with the suited skunk. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" (Eliot) Losey's concurrent The Sleeping Tiger takes a different tack. With Elise Aulinger, Edith Schultze-Westrum, and Steffi Stroux. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |