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"I like the silent church before the service begins," says Emerson, Ingmar Bergman readily fills it with a quarter of an hour of ponderous rites. The pastor (Gunnar Björnstrand) nurses a sore throat and a sparse congregation, a little boy rests his tongue on the pew while the organist sneaks a peek at his pocket watch. His heart's not in it, "God seems so very remote," the icons in the cell-like building include a skull and crossbones. Choked with spiritual aridity since his wife's death, he's probably not the best person for consoling the parishioner lost in nuclear dread (Max von Sydow). Religion appears "obscure and neurotic" to his lover (Ingrid Thulin), the spinsterish schoolmarm whose clinging loyalty to the disdainful widower is her own form of morbid faith. Ticking clocks, distant bells, footsteps and the hushed recitation of a letter straight to the camera, a frontal close-up sustained until an abrupt cut introduces the reader's hands fumbling with the cumbersome missive's pages. "Another Sunday in the vale of tears." The yoke of doubt, the chapel's frigid arena, a compressed immersion by Bergman. The screen glows subtly for the protagonist's renunciation, the view outside is a noisy stream with a corpse on its snowy banks. His words at the pulpit may be perfunctory but the wounding litany aimed at his mistress' "junkyard of idiotic trivialities" is fully felt, she grimly absorbs the abuse and removes her specs to size him up: "Your face is just a white blob." The handicapped sexton (Allan Edwall) has a practical use for Christ's suffering, just enough inspiration to get the "rotten clergyman" back to the habit. Sanctus at the close in what might be an empty movie theater, "once more, with feeling." Schrader properly transmutes Scandinavian angst into American violence in First Reformed. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. With Gunnel Lindblom, Kolbjörn Knudsen, Olof Thunberg, and Elsa Ebbesen. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |