PLOT OUTLINE. Two women and a little boy are travelling through some mysterious foreign country by train. They arrive at a town and check in at a hotel of good standard. They are on their way home for treatment of a severe illness of one of the women, who are sisters. There is some kind of a crisis in the country, but this does not affect the Swedish sisters, who are all engulfed in their personal very troubled relation. Neither is the unknowing little boy disturbed; he walks around all alone, forgotten by his mother and his aunt, who are completely absorbed with themselves. During his wanderings, he meets different people and makes curious observations he does not fully understand, while the two women build up a tension culminating in a tempestuous confrontation.
ANALYSIS. This film allows a rather clearcut definition of a list of thematic elements, the interactions, balances and contrasts of which blend an fuse constituting the film's meaning and errand considered as a singular concept. First and foremost, there is the awe and curiosity of the child discovering the little world around him on his own; the shattering neurotic anxieties of the adult world; the threatening atmosphere of the equally troubled bigger world of society, politics and war; and the ubiquitous, feverish and peculiarly alien influence of a haunting, precariously suppressed sexuality intermittently surfacing in all kinds of chaotic intermezzo.
So, as so often we have to deal with quadruple, even quadratic structure mapping six relations / contrasts / tensions, producing a Field Of Meaning. This is the formal character of the film. The content is for the viewer to work out.
JUDGMENT. Again Ingmar Bergman proves his genius for hitting the mark of a perfect and universal expression of clearly recognizable phenomena. Those dwarfs! That absurd but well-meaning janitor understanding nothing! And big-horrified-eyes Ingrid Thulin, that ultimate She-Monster of a nervous wreck, whose tormenting problems are absolutely unintelligible... It is all, as typically Bergman, just optimal.
Now what does the film want to tell us? Of the four constitutive themes mentioned above, Childhood, Adulthood, Politics and Sexuality, only the first gives a light picture; the three others are all dark and threatening. And this Childhood, as we see it here, is somehow turning the world upside down: the new world confronting is utterly strange and inscrutable; but at the same time friendly and most inviting... while all the well known seems painful and depressing. Thus, the child is centrifugally motivated for productive probing into an Unknown full of Promise.
I think this is the basic message of the film: the Authenticity of Childhood, like Clear Eyes seeing true Reality - before it's all obscured by Sexuality and "Reality"-as-we-know-it setting in.
This is another towering masterpiece of Ingmar Bergman. For it's lucidity of thought, power of expression and formal perfection, there is, for rating, no option but another 10/10.
ANALYSIS. This film allows a rather clearcut definition of a list of thematic elements, the interactions, balances and contrasts of which blend an fuse constituting the film's meaning and errand considered as a singular concept. First and foremost, there is the awe and curiosity of the child discovering the little world around him on his own; the shattering neurotic anxieties of the adult world; the threatening atmosphere of the equally troubled bigger world of society, politics and war; and the ubiquitous, feverish and peculiarly alien influence of a haunting, precariously suppressed sexuality intermittently surfacing in all kinds of chaotic intermezzo.
So, as so often we have to deal with quadruple, even quadratic structure mapping six relations / contrasts / tensions, producing a Field Of Meaning. This is the formal character of the film. The content is for the viewer to work out.
JUDGMENT. Again Ingmar Bergman proves his genius for hitting the mark of a perfect and universal expression of clearly recognizable phenomena. Those dwarfs! That absurd but well-meaning janitor understanding nothing! And big-horrified-eyes Ingrid Thulin, that ultimate She-Monster of a nervous wreck, whose tormenting problems are absolutely unintelligible... It is all, as typically Bergman, just optimal.
Now what does the film want to tell us? Of the four constitutive themes mentioned above, Childhood, Adulthood, Politics and Sexuality, only the first gives a light picture; the three others are all dark and threatening. And this Childhood, as we see it here, is somehow turning the world upside down: the new world confronting is utterly strange and inscrutable; but at the same time friendly and most inviting... while all the well known seems painful and depressing. Thus, the child is centrifugally motivated for productive probing into an Unknown full of Promise.
I think this is the basic message of the film: the Authenticity of Childhood, like Clear Eyes seeing true Reality - before it's all obscured by Sexuality and "Reality"-as-we-know-it setting in.
This is another towering masterpiece of Ingmar Bergman. For it's lucidity of thought, power of expression and formal perfection, there is, for rating, no option but another 10/10.