My admiration for Ingmar Bergman wanes in direct proportion to the number of films of his I see. I become more and more convinced that he was a very limited storyteller, and what seems profound in his movies when you're brand new to them and film scholars are telling you how brilliant he is begins to seem feel like parody by the time you've seen the tenth film that feels virtually interchangeable with the nine others.
"The Silence" is the final film in Bergman's faith trilogy, preceded by "Through a Glass Darkly" (the best in the series) and "Winter Light" (which will make you want to jump off a bridge). "The Silence" is about what you'd expect from the title: quiet, brooding, suffocating and disquieting. Like Bergman at his best, it contains beautiful compositions and shows an obvious mastery of the technical side of film-making; but like Bergman at his worst, it may strike you as pretentious, vague and self-conscious. How you react to it may depend greatly on what kind of mood you're in, and how many Bergman movies you've seen. I'm giving it a rating of 7, because in the world of Bergman movies, he's done much worse ("Hour of the Wolf," anyone?) Grade: B
"The Silence" is the final film in Bergman's faith trilogy, preceded by "Through a Glass Darkly" (the best in the series) and "Winter Light" (which will make you want to jump off a bridge). "The Silence" is about what you'd expect from the title: quiet, brooding, suffocating and disquieting. Like Bergman at his best, it contains beautiful compositions and shows an obvious mastery of the technical side of film-making; but like Bergman at his worst, it may strike you as pretentious, vague and self-conscious. How you react to it may depend greatly on what kind of mood you're in, and how many Bergman movies you've seen. I'm giving it a rating of 7, because in the world of Bergman movies, he's done much worse ("Hour of the Wolf," anyone?) Grade: B