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Timcop4.5

Bergman relaxes a bit with this one and sticks to more easygoing topics like suicide, incest, mental illness, and hatred. Pretty breezy stuff.

Sally Jane Black

After watching this, I was curious what the title referred to. Looking it up brought me to the Wikipedia article on the Bible verse in which it is contained, and I was genuinely moved by the beauty of the verse, so I thought I would share it here (editing out the chapter numbers and such):"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing."Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away."When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly*, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known."And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." - 1 Corinthians 13* This part is translated in the King James version as the phrase "through a glass, darkly."Obviously, this contains more than one line that is famous, oft quoted, and probably confused for Shakespeare. I think all of the major ideas presented here are captured in Bergman's film. I am not going to be very good at putting all of this into words, so bear with me as I try.Apparently, the original uses the Greek word "agape," which is translated in some versions as "charity" and others as "love." I have been vaguely aware of the philosophical term as a sort of divine, universal love, which is also fitting. Love as a concept is one of my favorite philosophical ideas, especially how it relates to ethics, but if I start going off on that, you'll all think I'm some sort of awful hippie.This film, part of Bergman's faith trilogy, seems to be about a lot of things, with an undercurrent of the concept of love running throughout. It seems to be about both the moment we lose our faith and the moment we realize the fallibility of our parents. It connects these elegantly through the character of Karin, who suffers from some unnamed mental illness. In broader terms, this film is as much about family as faith. In the relationships depicted between Karin, her father, and her brother (named Minus), various intrafamilial dynamics play out. Her husband, Martin, serves as a slightly removed moral compass in a way, but also some sort of failed support system for Karin.Every scene in this film seems to be burdened with intentional meaning. After establishing the characters' basic, surface roles, the film dives into a series of significant moments over the course of a day or two. I don't entirely know where to start, so I will just dive into some of the bigger moments and sort it out later.First, there is Karin's reading of her father's diary. Leading up to this, she has just had a hallucinatory episode that she will describe later. She has gone to her father for comfort, and he has tucked her in. Notably, he has been up all night writing, and as soon as she is tucked in, he goes back to it. Moments later, he leaves to attend some task with her brother. She slips out of bed, compelled, and peaks into his diary to find that he has written that her illness is "incurable" and that he is horrified to learn that he wishes to document her illness and use her experiences. She is wounded, deeply, and turns to her husband for comfort. In this moment, she understands--perhaps not clearly--the fallibility of her own father. Having read, after watching Winter Light, that this trilogy was supposed to be a reaction to Bergman's religious upbringing and the strict piety of his own father, this moment reads as the start not just of Karin's loss of faith in her parent, but also in God.This is borne out in the climax, when she returns to the room where she hallucinated before. She had explained to her brother that her vision showed her a room full of people waiting for a door to open, and that she expected God would be coming through. When God finally comes, she hallucinates him as a horrifying spider that tries to penetrate her (going back to the father/God comparison, this is bluntly Oedipal). In a voice rich with pain, she declares that she has seen God in the wake of this traumatizing vision, and it seems to me that in this moment, her faith is destroyed, and the poisonous relationship with her father is clarified. Her relationship with her brother is similarly troubled. In him, she seeks an impossible closeness, a different kind of poisonous relationship. Minus confides in her that he desperately wants his father's attentions, and early on, he and Karin perform a play that not so subtly denigrates their father's artistic efforts. He rebuffs his sister's attempts at closeness, feeling sexual frustration, and she knowingly teases him and his frustrations. This culminates when, in a moment of weakness and panic, she seduces him on a shipwrecked vessel. I don't entirely know what to make of this in the context of the themes I am trying to understand, but my instinct is that this is an expression of incomplete, misdirected, desperate love, Not receiving the unconditional love from her father that she needs, not being able to connect with her husband, she latches on to the next closes figure in a damaging and distraught manner. Martin, her husband, treats Karin as a child--something she comments on. She clearly needs something more than that, and their connection is clearly damaged by this treatment. When she wants comfort, in her moments of weakness, she turns away from him, save for the aftermath of her father's written betrayal. His response is to talk his way out of his own culpability in the matter and to later confront her father when he is alone with him. While in that confrontation he makes some pointed observations about the failures of Karin's father, he seems also to be avoiding his own flaws. He is enough an outsider from this dysfunctional family to see where the cracks are, but he is not strong enough to be able to fix them.To put it another way, none of the men on the island with Karin are capable of providing her with the love and support she needs. Inevitably, her illness dredges up a horrifying image of God (that coincides with the arrival of the helicopter-ambulance that is coming for her). She is being taken away from those who should love and support her and placed in the arms of a cold, clinical God that only wants to penetrate her, metaphorically. Meanwhile, her brother speaks with her father about the situation, and her father reveals that he recently tried to kill himself, only to be saved by car trouble. In his salvation, he realized that he needed something to hold on to, and he advises his son that this is how to get through the low moments of life. Essentially, he tells him to believe in love, if he can't believe in God--though the two might be one and the same. He indicates that this is what Karin needs as well. In the wake of this, all Minus can say is, in awe, "Father spoke to me." His need to connect to his father is fulfilled, but we have just seen the price of parental worship. The cycle seems doomed to continue.When I first read the Bible verse above, I thought the line about childish things to be jarringly out of place, but as I write this, I realize that it is perhaps the crux of understanding this film. This film depicts the traumatic moments wherein Karin puts away childish things and begins to see more clearly (perhaps) and relates the moment her father did. It sets up Minus for that fall later on. The imperfect vision caused by the dimly lit mirror builds walls around us. The film juxtaposes faith, art, and even medicine (Martin's seemingly preferred God), it seems, as those dim mirrors, suggesting that, in the revelation by Karin's father, love is perhaps the real key (as does the verse above, if I am not mistaken) to seeing clearly. Without the love and support of her family, Karin's illusions break and she is given into the hands of doctors, and perhaps her more caring but flawed husband. Her father's devotion to his art deprives his children of the love they need to be hale and whole. He barely knows them, and though he professes to understand the need for love, it seems to take Karin's breakdown to make him capable of expressing that to one of his children.As I watched, I noted how the film was using shadow and distance to depict the relationships between the characters in some ways. Her father breaks down weeping, alone in the dark. Her mad moment of incest occurs in a dank, dark ship's hold. The characters are constantly shown with together in frame, at varying distances from each other, depending on the moment. Minus curls up in a great room, before a door, hidden in a corner, alone. Our vision is constantly slightly obscured by shadow, by positioning, by wide angle shots, effecting the limited understanding the title suggests, yet using that limitation to illustrate the themes and bring deeper understanding of the film and its ideas. Similarly, the absence of love, the failings and dysfunction of this family, reveal the depths and strength of love. By showing how Karin's father--David, by the way, is his name--as distant and focused on his art over his family, by showing Martin's reluctance to reveal all to Karin ("[love] does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth"), by Karin's desperate teasing ("is not provoked") and seduction ("does not seek its own," is that a pun on my part?) of Minus, the film shows what love actually is and should be. It took me a long time to truly understand the fallibility of my parents. I don't know if all children are the same as I was--I doubt it--but there was always some lingering resentment toward slights real and imagined from my parents as I yearned to and finally escaped the cesspool of small town Alabama. As I matured--absurdly slowly--I realized most of my grievances were... I won't say unjustified, but too far gone to matter. I was old enough to move past them, and forgiveness came gradually. The moment that everything hit me was late in this process, but significant. My sister, at age of 20 or so, gave birth to a child, and I was wracked with a concern. I am about 4 years older than her, and I knew that at my age, I was nowhere near ready for children. How, then, could she have been? Sure, people mature at different rates, but at 20 years old, how can anyone be mature enough to be responsible for a baby?And then the realization of how old my parents were when they had my old brother (my mother would have been 21), hell, how old they were when they had me, or any of my siblings, struck me. It was like a bolt of lightning: they could not possibly have had any idea what they were doing. And then I realized, pretty much no one does. I had been logically aware that my parents weren't perfect, but the full scope of what that meant never quite struck me until then (I'm a late bloomer, I know). Any grievance I had died then. Mistakes are inevitable. My parents, all things considered, did a pretty good job, much much much better than many others I've come to know. I learned so much from them, but I can remember specifically overhearing my mother speak in terms that conveyed her unconditional care and love of her children. She had a friend who was anorexic, and her friend had described not having support in college, not having money to eat, and how that had contributed to her condition. My mother was telling my father that she would never let that happen to her children. No matter how upset I've been with my parents, no matter how fucked up or scared I've been in life, I've had that memory to hold onto, this comforting notion that someone out there will catch me if I fall. There's no amount of gratitude or repayment is possible for that. It is a privilege I should work harder at not taking for granted.Bergman's film brought all this back up in my mind as I watched it, and the connection to the above Bible verse only sealed it. While Bergman made this films to come to terms with his own upbringing and doubts on God and faith, it seems even more likely to me that he was--intentionally or not--clearly addressing this fundamental understanding of human fallibility. Through love, unconditional, giving, and pure, we find understanding, and our fallible little selves seldom achieve anything close to that. We have, as David says late in the film, to cling to love in the dark times, when we can't see anything beyond the shadows, to see us through. By showing Karin in her darkest moments, without that support, and her subsequent fall into doubt and madness, he illustrates the need for love more clearly in shadow and distance than any pop song with its sunshine and rainbows could ever hope to.

brendan o'hare4.5

I don’t know if Bergman intended for this to happen but at one point a character reached for their glass of water at the exact same time I did