Customer Reviews
Exploration of good and evil
Ingmar Bergman's film "The Virgin Spring" is based on the Swedish folk ballad. It is set at the time when pagan worship was intermixed with newly arrived Christianity. The film explores the meaning of good and evil and how it affects us in every day life. According to the story, it is customary that a young virgin maiden brings candles and offerings to the Church on a high holiday. Karen, an only daughter of a wealthy trader and his wife is to deliver them to the church herself. Her escort is a female servant, pregnant and unmarried who spends her time cooking, baking and taking care of household chores. Karen is young, pure, innocent, blond; her servant is dark haired, thin and worn out from the hard work and pregnancy and for all that resentful. While Karen is adored, pampered and spoiled by her parents and servants, her servant girl is tormented and criticised about everything about her. Both of them are day and night. In the process of delivering candles to the church, naive Karen runs into three shepards and offers them some food. Before long, two elder ones attack her, rape her and murder her. She is stripped off her clothes and left in a ditch as her servant girl is watching it all in horror. Circumstances bring shepards to Karen's parents house where they are offered food and shelter. In gratitude, shepards offer Karen's mother Karen's clothes for sale, not realizing that it is murdered girls' mother they were selling clothes to. As pregnant girl servant makes it to the village and explains to Karen's father what has happened and she confirms that shepards are rapists and murderers, Karen's father decides to ravenge his only child's death. All three shepards are murdered and household sets out to finding Karen's body. It is at the place where Karen's body is found that some of the most powerful scenes from the film transpire. Her father is asking God how God could allow that a young, innocent girl has such terrible fate. In the nature where everything is so calm and beautiful how could God take away precious life of an innocent girl? It is after Karen's body is removed, that everyone realizes that she was laid under a spring of pure water of life. So the revenge was futile. Karen is dead, her tormentors are dead, life will never be the same for everyone involved, but must start new, fresh and pure with everlasting pain that will be reminder to what happened to a young maiden and everyone who loved and resented her.
"You allowed it to happen!"
Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), the spoiled but lovable only surviving child of wealthy householder Tore (Max von Sydow) and his wife Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) is raped and murdered as a dark and gypsy-like free spirited servant, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) looks on. Later, the rapists unwittingly ask for shelter from the night at Tore's house. Their identity is discovered, Tore slays each of them (even a young boy who accompanies them but who didn't participate in the crime), Karin's body is discovered, and a healing spring miraculously gushes from the spot where she was violated and slain. The film closes with everyone kneeling in prayer.
Your typical "Song of Bernadette" sort of flick? Nope. It's Bergman, and that means that the apparent piety of the film needs to be read through a glass darkly. The film, both visually and thematically, is really a study in contrast between darkness and light: camera shots accentuate the interplay between the two, and so do the moral dynamics of the characters and the action. Karin is a combination of spoiled and innocent child; Ingeri, tempest and depth; Tore, piety and fury; Mareta, self-hatred and maternal love. Nothing in the world is straightforward, unambiguous, simple. Even the "religious" ending of the film is immediately prefaced by an agonized Tore, on his knees but nonetheless defiant and angry (again, the contrast), shouting out to God: "You allowed it to happen--the death of an innocent child and my vengeance! You allowed it to happen! I don't understand you!" The Job-like rebel--and yet in the very next frame, Tore says: "Yet still I ask your forgiveness. I don't know any other way to live." This magnificent scene reminds one of the story from Auschiwtz, in which interned rabbis, after an all-night session, determined that God was guilty of crimes against humanity, but then adjourned for morning prayer.
Bergmam originally intended "Virgin Spring," filmed immmediately after "Seventh Seal," to be the first in his God trilogy. Eventually, however, it was excluded from the trilogy. Yet the theme of all five films, from "Seventh Seal" to "The Silence," are of one piece: how to live in a world where God is either absent or malevolent. It's a good question.
The performances in this film, by the way, are magnificent. Pettersson is the perfect spoiled, innocent girl, and Lindblom's darkness and anger are frightening. Von Sydow is frightening in a different way as the avenging father. But perhaps the finest performance is given by Valberg, whose Mareta is a loveless, desperate woman who clings to her only surviving child by spoiling her, and who apparently tries to make deals with providence by physically punishing herself.
INGMAR BERGMAN, OPUS 21
***** 1960. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. A prize in Cannes and Academy award in the Best Foreign Language Film category. This adaptation of a ballad of the XIVth century tells the story of a young virgin who's raped in the forest by three vagrants while riding to the church. I don't know what to admire most in this film: Ulla Isaksson's screenplay that is so keen with its references to fairy tales (the Little Red Riding Hood, for instance) or the description of the antagonism Paganism/Christianism, Sven Nykvist's photography which literally re-creates before our eyes paintings of the Middle Ages or at last the formidable artistic fusion that existed between Ingmar Bergman and his actors. No place for improvisation in Bergman's cinema! I also must praise this Criterion release because of the added boni, such as the 2005 Gunnel Lindblom/ Birgitta Pettersson interview or the recorded seminar given by Ingmar Bergman in the American Film Institute in 1975. Masterpiece.
True Masterpiece
With a sublime precise passion the mighty Ingmar Bergman has created, with the beautiful and crisp cinematographer Sven Nykist, a stellar experience in The Virgin Spring, a medieval story of a coming to God through a parent's gravest nightmare.
The swiftness of the story, the space allowed for interpretation, the simplicity of intention; the ominous nature of dream, feeling, omen, impulse-all evenly and gently presented, make for a spectacular film.
The final section, focusing on the (Max von Sydow) father of a murdered maiden, and his will to revenge and blossoming faith is harrowing, with a deafening silence and one of Film's greatest silent screams.
No hyperbole here: The Virgin Spring is a masterpiece of faith, silence, impulse, eternal love and ultimate hope. Highly recommended.
A dark parable of sin and vengeance
A virgin spring would be an early spring when the days break bright and clear but the nights are still forbiddingly cold. As one of the characters says, The day began with such promise only to end tragically--or words to that effect. A virgin spring is also that time in a young maiden's life when she is still innocent and has no sense of the hardships to come or the beasts that dwell in the deep dark woods. And a virgin spring may be a miraculous sign from God of clear spring water flowing spontaneously from an hitherto unknown fountain, a place on which to build a church to honor the God that one has offended.
All of these springs are in this riveting masterwork by one of cinema's greatest directors, the incomparable Ingmar Bergman. Light and darkness suffuse the 14th century landscape of a Sweden only partially given over to Christianity. Odin still rules the forests and the glades, the mountain tops and the cold, deep rivers. He is the god of darkness in this film, almost something akin to the devil, worshiped by the bridge keeper shaman with his herbs and by the dark-haired, dark-eyed young servant Ingeri (played with something close to demonic vivaciousness by Gunnel Lindblom). Lightness comes in the form of her privileged stepsister, Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) who is blonde and gets to wear fine clothes and is much loved by her father, Tore (Max von Sydow), and her doting mother, Mareta (Birgitta Valberg).
And so one bright spring day the two young women ride off to town, Karin in her finery carrying candles for the church, Ingeri in her rags many months pregnant with the child of someone who had forced himself upon her, her heart full of jealousy and hate. She has prayed to Odin for harm to come to Karin, for Karin to be taken against her will as she was, for Karin to suffer the humiliation and the pain that she suffered. In fact she has worked a little black magic with a toad in the bread that Karin takes with her.
She says to Karin, it could happen to you if a man puts his hands on your neck and around your waist. But Karin says no she would rebuff such a man, and when she is with child she will be happily married to a man of substance and privilege. But the man is stronger and will take you behind a bush and you won't be able to fight him off, Ingeri insists. Karin slaps her for such insolence.
This is a foreshadowing of events to come. But first they come upon a bridge keeper, an old shamanistic man living alone, a man who collects medicinal herbs and feeds the ravens. He represents the old Norse gods. While they are there Ingeri decides she can't go on. Karin leaves and the bridge keeper presses close to Ingeri to enthrall her with the black magic of the old gods. But she becomes frightened and runs away.
The thing that stays with me the most is the pure animal brutality of the two herders. They had only a sense of greed and ignorance about them. They raped and murdered and stole, and then stupidly sealed their own fate. They seemed almost subhuman.
Von Sydow's Tore is almost like a Norse God. And when he confronted God with "You saw this!" he spoke for everyone who has ever suffered a grievous harm and has wondered why God let it happen. Of course he represents along with his wife, Christianity.
The other thing that stays with me is the harsh life that these Swedes from the 14th century had to live. One imagines how short the spring and how long the winter. And one understands Karin's desire to have fun after being cooped up all winter. The terrible irony that is at the heart of the human condition is this hope of spring which everyone feels so powerfully; and then to have this senseless tragedy ensue defies explanation.
But an explanation is attempted. Bergman points to the girl's vanity and her naivety, to the mother's jealousy of the father who is more loved by Karin, to the way they look down on Ingeri and treat her like a serf who has sinned. Or even to the palpable presence of evil in the world. But the real explanation belongs to something naturalistic, primeval, something dark and cold and bestial in the Swedish woods, something before civilization and before the rule of law.
Indelible is Gunnel Lindblom's Ingeri, a woman-child of the devil almost (Odin would be like the devil to these medieval Christians), embittered and full of hate, but with such an animal presence. The carefully plotted story that allows her to watch her desire for revenge come to life in front of her eyes and then to have her cry out later in guilt and blame herself for what she had done heightens our involvement and deepens the complex tragedy.
Bottom line: one of Bergman's best and that is very good indeed.
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