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Shame, 1968
Some films get a ton of different parts of your brain firing, and that is definitely what happened with me as I watched Shame.
A couple named Ava (Liv Ullmann) and Jan (Max von Sydow) live on a farm in the countryside of an unspecified country. A war wages on, unseen by them at first. Then one days jets fly overhead and paratroopers arrive. Despite their relatively neutral status, they come under siege from both sides. As they endure one trial after another, an irreparable rift begins to form between Eva and Jan.
Something that grew on me the more I watched the film was the was that visually it speaks to both the past and a vague futuristic post-apocalypse. You know when you watch a movie and a visual from it resonates incredibly strongly in your mind and you realize it's because it reminds you of another film? Several times during Shame I was reminded of certain shots from The Road.
We've had a few conversations in this thread about what it means for a movie to be anti-war. I think that Shame is a film that can unhesitatingly be given that label. We are never given to understand why the war is even happening, aside from a phrase here and there like "revolution" and "liberation." But these words are stripped of their potentially benevolent meetings. After the paratroopers threaten Eva and Jan, they shove a trembling Eva in front of a camera as "testimony" of their liberation. Later this footage is used in an accusation against Eva and Jan of collaboration with the enemy. Both sides seem to regard Eva and Jan only for what they can take from them and how they can use them. If Eva and Jan ("the people") are meant to benefit from the revolution or the resistance or the liberation, that certainly doesn't seem to be the case.
At a character level, the film is also a damning look at what it means to be brought to the point of just wanting to survive. In the beginning of the film, Jan can't bring himself to shoot or otherwise kill the couple's chickens. By the halfway point of the film, he is willing to commit indirect or even direct actions that kill others. Eva is a ball of frustration. She wants children, but knows that she cannot in good conscience bring them into this world of violence. She is the more forceful of the two (running out of the house to help a stranded paratrooper who is caught in a tree), and although she maintains more of her humanity and empathy, she falls into a more visceral despair.
I've said this before about a movie, but this is the kind of film where I find myself wanting to simply describe things that happened in it ("And then there's this scene where . . . ") as opposed to necessarily analyzing it. I think that this is largely because my response to it was so much on an emotional level, and that can be harder to articulate in a review.
This is definitely one of the more bleak (LOL, I've used that word a lot this month!) films I've seen from Bergman. The imagery it contains of both violence and the aftermath of violence is some of the stronger things in his filmography. Strangely, though I'm sure I've heard of this film before, neither the title nor the plot were familiar to me. I'm incredibly glad that it was recommended to me.
Shame, 1968
Some films get a ton of different parts of your brain firing, and that is definitely what happened with me as I watched Shame.
A couple named Ava (Liv Ullmann) and Jan (Max von Sydow) live on a farm in the countryside of an unspecified country. A war wages on, unseen by them at first. Then one days jets fly overhead and paratroopers arrive. Despite their relatively neutral status, they come under siege from both sides. As they endure one trial after another, an irreparable rift begins to form between Eva and Jan.
Something that grew on me the more I watched the film was the was that visually it speaks to both the past and a vague futuristic post-apocalypse. You know when you watch a movie and a visual from it resonates incredibly strongly in your mind and you realize it's because it reminds you of another film? Several times during Shame I was reminded of certain shots from The Road.
We've had a few conversations in this thread about what it means for a movie to be anti-war. I think that Shame is a film that can unhesitatingly be given that label. We are never given to understand why the war is even happening, aside from a phrase here and there like "revolution" and "liberation." But these words are stripped of their potentially benevolent meetings. After the paratroopers threaten Eva and Jan, they shove a trembling Eva in front of a camera as "testimony" of their liberation. Later this footage is used in an accusation against Eva and Jan of collaboration with the enemy. Both sides seem to regard Eva and Jan only for what they can take from them and how they can use them. If Eva and Jan ("the people") are meant to benefit from the revolution or the resistance or the liberation, that certainly doesn't seem to be the case.
At a character level, the film is also a damning look at what it means to be brought to the point of just wanting to survive. In the beginning of the film, Jan can't bring himself to shoot or otherwise kill the couple's chickens. By the halfway point of the film, he is willing to commit indirect or even direct actions that kill others. Eva is a ball of frustration. She wants children, but knows that she cannot in good conscience bring them into this world of violence. She is the more forceful of the two (running out of the house to help a stranded paratrooper who is caught in a tree), and although she maintains more of her humanity and empathy, she falls into a more visceral despair.
I've said this before about a movie, but this is the kind of film where I find myself wanting to simply describe things that happened in it ("And then there's this scene where . . . ") as opposed to necessarily analyzing it. I think that this is largely because my response to it was so much on an emotional level, and that can be harder to articulate in a review.
This is definitely one of the more bleak (LOL, I've used that word a lot this month!) films I've seen from Bergman. The imagery it contains of both violence and the aftermath of violence is some of the stronger things in his filmography. Strangely, though I'm sure I've heard of this film before, neither the title nor the plot were familiar to me. I'm incredibly glad that it was recommended to me.