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Between Tati (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot) and Kubrick (The Shining), "a raid on the inarticulate." The opening provides some of Ingmar Bergman's most fluent filmmaking—suffocation in a train compartment, flickering lights in a tunnel, a parallel locomotive pulling armored tanks to rhythmic effect. Foreign terrain, in the middle of a heat wave and on the brink of war. Body and mind not on good terms, thus sisters carnal (Gunnel Lindblom) and intellectual (Ingrid Thulin) on a strained hotel stay, the former impatiently cruises for action while the latter medicates an agonizing illness with cigarettes and alcohol. (A choice early shot has Thulin in upside-down close-up on a pillow wincing with disgust after diddling herself, "a matter of erections and secretions.") Lindblom's young son (Jörgen Lindström) meanwhile wanders the corridors, toy gun in hand. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," says Wittgenstein. Bergman in rivalry with Antonioni, a stark-humid fugue on the reliable hobgoblin of communication. The boy befriends a troupe of dwarf entertainers, Mom flees from a couple humping in the audience of a cabaret show, Aunt peers out the window and sees herself reflected in an emaciated equine dragging a cart. The local idiom stumps the professional translator, the attentive old waiter (Håkan Jahnberg) offers the lingua franca of Bach. The divide scarcely slows Lindblom, who shares a bout of angry sex with a bartender (Birger Malmsten). "How nice that we don't understand each other." A bravura flow of unease to blur the abstract and the visceral, Lidblom's curves against symmetrical lines, Thulin's angles writhing amid sheets. L'Année dernière à Marienbad is taken into account, God goes unmentioned but for the memory of the jolly paterfamilias departing in a heavy coffin. "Watch your step among the ghosts and memories." Lindström's grave gaze provides the grain of hope at the close, and a bridge into Persona. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |