Ingmar Bergman's wonderful film


There have of course been not a few important films - by the Dane Dreyer, for instance, and the Frenchmen Cocteau and Carne - which have put themselves in "period" fancy dress to give a more remote, symbolic meaning to their observations on life and death.

You can hunt about in the history of the cinema and bring up a distant cousin or two for Bergman's great work. Yet, when all the delving is done, this film remains something quite distinct, a wonderful film which is not quite like any other.

It might most simply be described as a screen version of a medieval morality play: it is dressed in medieval costume and its characters, who include Death in their number, are evidently meant to portray various types of simplified humanity - the crusading knight (Max von Sydow), seeking ideal answers to perennial questions, his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand), who seeks no answers because he is convinced that life after death has none to offer, the scholar turned villain, the simple folk who wonder and hope a little but not much.

These and the rest are essentally conventional figures and, of course, Death is a kind of convention too. But they are conventional figures with an enormous difference, one that comes partly from remarkable casting and acting: the lean, gentle knight and his mighty, noble, utterly disillusioned squire are, in their quite distinct ways, imposing to a degree.

The difference comes, too, from a very rare quality of forcefulness, simplicity and, indeed, integrity in the writing and in the direction; and for both of these Bergman was responsible.

We talk so often about the cinema's powers of realism on the one hand, and of fantasy on the other. The wonder of Bergman's film is that on his fancy-dress setting he imposes a conviction which is much more disturbing than that provided by realistic "documentary" pictures, even in good films, of life as we know it.

He is concerned to deal with life's ultimate questions and, such is his mastery of cast and written word and camera, that he nowhere needs to strain his idiom to show that the essence of the matter in plague-stricken, medieval, unrealistic Sweden was essentially the same of it is in nuclear-fissionable Europe to-day.

His film may be like a medieval morality play, but it is not a bit quaint, and it wears its stylised garb with such an ease of casual inattention that, in the end, it looks entirely modern.