Word: bergman
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When sex is the strongest chemical in the pill, it takes a phenomenal dose to have much effect on the shockproof Swedes-but Bergman at the moment has them reeling. His new film, Silence, has opened in Stockholm, and for the first time a sizable number of Swedish moviegoers are wondering if the dose has grown too powerful. Growling dark epithets, people are actually leaving the theater midway through the film. Others go away slowly at the end, stunned, like children retreating from a keyhole...
Inflammations. The people in Silence move through an almost undersea life where they have little communication with one another, less with the surrounding world, and none with God. A woman, her young son, and her unmarried sister travel through a country invented by Bergman, where people speak an incomprehensible rococo-syllabic language, also invented by Bergman. The story line is wavy and apparently aimless. The unmarried woman has a marked erotic interest in her sister. The sister's heterosexuality is fired rather than suppressed by this. It is inflamed further when she goes to a variety show...
...Bergman's treatment of this is unalloyedly graphic. There are no suggestive fadeouts. The camera coldly watches the coupling of his unloving couples, and the result is unlovely. When his waspish lesbian is left alone, the camera lingers to record an act of self-love...
...general intellectual counterattack to all this was summed up in a letter to the daily Aftonbladet. "Is a film immoral," asked the writer, "just because it shows immoral people?" The point remains moot in smoldering Stockholm. Bergman himself has had no disturbing second thoughts. Silence is the third segment of a trilogy about God, according to Ingmar. The first two parts were Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. Silence is intended to depict the cold horror of human existence when God averts his face and there is no light...
Poem or Muck? Swedish newspapers, in recent weeks, have printed more than 200 articles debating whether Bergman's film is art or pornography, whether it is "his strongest poem" or simply "muck." Letter-writing men are more shocked than women. Swedish teenagers, usually celebrated for their easygoing physical outlook, are offended. "Right now I don't want to see any more Bergman films," said one girl last week. "The sex scenes were almost animalistic, and I was shocked...