Shame

 Conventional war movies celebrate courage and glory.  But, as Ingmar Bergman demonstrates in Shame (1968), war is probably best imagined as cruelty that induces, not courage, but cowardice and, indeed, behavior so motivated by craven fear as to be shameful.  Hollywood films about war imply that heroism is the norm in combat.  But this is a screen concealing an experience that is mostly without heroism, the operation of cowardice that compromises all human values, dissolving them into rancid self-interest.  Soldiers are only incidental to Bergman's vision of warfare in Shame -- the victims of conflict, of course, are not the warriors but the civilians caught between opposing fields of fire.  Shame is literally an anti-war picture -- it's not about soldiers but civilians and demonstrates in an icy clinical manner that war erodes all relationships between people.  As we have come to learn, war isn't about battles but refugees.  (It's also worth noting that Sweden's compromised situation in World War II is implicit in the questions that the movie poses:  if we were really subjected to a terrifying occupation or alliance with evil what would be really willing to do to survive?)

A married couple, Jan and Eva have fled to an island, perhaps, to avoid the ravages of war on the mainland.  They aren't particularly happy and Eva nourishes a sour contempt for her feckless husband.  An invasion of the island is rumored.  The place's lanes are clogged with tanks and trucks towing howitzers.  Jan and Eva own an old station wagon that is as much a character in the film as the protagonists; the vehicle refuses to start reliably, often in the most perilous of situations.  At least, Jan should be able to fix the car, Eva says, but he's too inept to succeed even as a shade-tree mechanic.  At the village near the ferry, Jan and Eva go to an antique store to buy a bottle of wine from a friend who runs the place.  (The resourceful Eva has procured a fish from an angler casting his line into a little creek flowing into the sea; Jan, watching his beautiful young wife haggling for the fish is suddenly smitten with love for her -- probably, because she can find food and seems undiminished by the war.)  The man at the antique shop, Frederik, is terrified; despite his "bad foot", he has been conscripted.  He shows the couple a Meissen music box, a beautiful fragile object depicting a man and woman in courtly dress dancing -- it's like a vision from The Magic Flute.  Jan and Eva return to their farm where they have a green house and seem to be growing berries and tomatoes.  For Bergman, a picnic outside is a classic locus amoenus, that is, a place of delight.  Eva is luminous in the summer light.  (She's played by Liv Ullmann in the very prime of her beauty.)  The couple slip down to the grass to make love.  But the next shot signals a radical and sordid change of mood:  we see Jan emerging from the privy and, then, jets zoom overhead dropping incendiary bombs,  phosphorous, it seems, that ignites the forests and burns the meadows.  A paratrooper strangles to death, hung from a tree.  Soldiers emerge from the woods and threaten Eva.  She's filmed stuttering to the camera, asked to say a few words about the war by the invading troops.  The island's defenders emerge from the shadows and there's a fire fight.  Eva and Jan flee at dawn, driving through shattered villages full of corpses.  When Eva sees a dead child, she's dumbstruck and decides that she's glad that they have no children.  

In the village, the local guard round up all the civilians, herding them into a school building incongruously decorated by children's pictures posted on the walls.  There's some haphazard torture, a man dies, and another man has his shoulder dislocated.  Jan is interrogated for collaborating with the invaders.  Her voice has been dubbed to make a propaganda film in which she seems to be congratulating the enemy on attacking the island.  Another collaborator is dragged out to a post to be executed.  But the town's commissar, Jacobi, pardons the man, sentencing him to a life of hard labor. ((Another camera crew has appeared to film Jacobi's clemency -- in the modern world, war and film are inextricably connected). Devastated by the experience, Jan and Eva return to their farm.  Jacobi calls on them daily and seems to be sleeping with Eva in exchange for providing the couple with liquor and cigarettes and, even, musical scores and other gifts -- for instance, he gives Eva his mother's wedding ring.  (Remember -- Eva and Jan played side-by-side in the Philharmonic orchestra before the war; in the opening scene, Jan awakes and says he dreamed that it was pre-war and that he and Eva were playing the largo from a Bach concerto together.)  Jan is complicit in the relationship between Eva and the sinister Jacobi, a man who is inconsistently tender and, then, cruel and demanding, In this film, Bergman has divided himself between two surrogates -- the ineffectual, but, then, murderous artist, Jan, and the brutal, demanding Jacobi.  In fact, Jan and Eva seem to be conspiring to murder Jacobi.  Everyone has been drinking too much.  Indeed, Eva notes that she's been drunk pretty much constantly.  Jacobi takes Eva aside.  He knows that the partisans are planning to kill him and he's afraid, not of death, but torture.  Jacobi gives Eva his life-savings; perhaps, he's planning suicide.  Then, the partisans attack the farm and Jacobi tries to buy them off by promising to pay the money that he's given to Eva to the guerillas.  But Jan has found the money and hidden it.  When Eva tells Jan to give up the money, he disingenuously says that he doesn't know where it is located (in fact, it's in the back pocket of his jeans). The partisans destroy the farm house and outbuildings and slaughter the animals.  Then, they hand Jan a gun and gesture that he should execute Jacobi.  Jan botches the murder, wounding Jacobi who crawls around in the mud before Jan shoots him four or five more times, failing to deliver the coup de grace.  (A partisan has to machine-gun him.)  With their house destroyed (as well as the Jan's violin, a wonderful instrument carved by an Italian who had fought Napoleon in Russia), the couple flee on foot to the coast.  Along the way, they encounter a terrified boy who has deserted.  Jan discovers that a fisherman has agreed to row refugees from the island to some place of safety -- possibly another country across the sea.  Jan, who was earlier unable to wring a chicken's neck, remorselessly kills the boy for his boots and, then, the couple stagger through a devastated, charred landscape to the coast where the boat is waiting.  The last few minutes of the film take place on the open boat where the refugees are starving and freezing to death.  One of the men commits suicide by slipping off the boat into the icy water.  The vessel gets entrapped in a flotilla of corpses, dead soldiers bobbing on the still waters.  This is a famous scene and suitably nightmarish -- the stench of the dead men nauseates the people on the boat and the men desperately try to push the corpses away from the vessel.  But the masses of dead bodies seems to be drawn to the boat like a magnet.  In the final scene, Jan and Eva are lying exhausted and, apparently, near death in the hull of the boat.  Jan (played by Max von Sydow) looks particularly cadaverous, like a 19th century painting of Lazarus just resurrected from his grave.  Eva says that she dreamed that they were in the city and that it was a beautiful day and that she was picking roses.  Then, a plane dropped bombs and the roses were all set afire but this didn't matter to Eva because the flowers were beautiful as they burned.

The film is a grim masterpiece, brilliant with many small, but penetrating details.  There's a brusque doctor who works for the torturers who quips at the dead and dying' for him, it's just a job.  Jan tries to kill a chicken for a meal but can't bring himself to wring the animal's neck -- he has to shoot the bird, something that he can't accomplish notwithstanding firing the gun at  close range.  In one harrowing scene, Jan and Eva are digging in muck, possibly harvesting potatoes -- they begin to shriek at one another, each accusing the other of being a "suck-up" to the authorities (in this case Jacobi with whom Eva is having sex).  There's a wheel barrow on which the couple slump in a desperate embrace.  Later, when Jacobi is riddled with bullets, his body is dragged away on that same wheel barrow.  Battles take place place off-screen as horrifying flashes of light and clouds of smoke billowing up over the wastelands of the stony beaches.  Made in 1968, Bergman's film was interpreted as being about Vietnam, that is, the plight of people caught between the opposing sides in a Civil War.  Certainly, the film's bleak vision and the isolating environs of the island -- it's Bergman's refuge, Faro -- sugges that there is literally no escape from circumstances that brutalize the characters.  The happy and glowing young wife becomes a prostitute.  The inept cowardly Jan turns into a feral murderer.  In the middle of the movie, Eva says that she feels like a character in someone else's dream and that she knows that the dreamer will feel a terrible sense of shame when he wakes up and remembers what his imagination has devised for him to dream.  Bergman tilts the table toward nihilism by cheating a little -- no one seems to know what the war is about.  (This seems false to my experience -- the problem with war is that everyone seems to know, or thinks they know, exactly what the fighting is for; people are sure of their motives and it's only later that they realize to their horror that it was all for nothing.)  The film is austere and doesn't feel like a typical Bergman movie -- there are no themes as to memory or the solace of art and romantic love.  The movie is part of a tetralogy of films shot on Faro Island and featuring Liv Ullmann who was, then, Bergman's lover -- these pictures are Persona, The Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna.  Persona and The Hour of the Wolf are despairing films about characters who are lost within the labyrinths of their own imaginations and dreams and who fail to find anything solid or grounding in their lives -- the boundaries between dream and reality are fatally blurred.  Shame seems almost documentary -- it's shot by the brilliant Sven Nykquist in chilly black and white with much jittery handheld camera or long, extended sequence shots.  But the documentary effect is an illusion or misdirection -- the nightmarish, Goya-influenced imagery, in fact, signals that we are trapped inside of Bergman's dream; there's no mingling of reality and dream in this film because it is all a terrible nightmare from beginning to end.  At the end of the picture, Eva says that someone has spoken in her dream but she can't recall what was said -- it seems she is referencing her own earlier comment, uttered in the middle of the film, that she is trapped in someone else's dream and the dreamer will be ashamed when he awakens.  Furthermore, there's a characteristically Nordic equation between the austere frigid landscapes and the plight experienced by the characters.  Liv Ullmann in an interview conducted in 2018 describes Bergman as being literally half-crazed when he made Shame, on the verge of a breakdown.  The ostensibly happily married musicians begin the film unhappy -- their happy marriage is purely notional.  Eva wants children.  The self-centered Jan abhors the idea.  Even at the outset of the movie the two are bickering and Eva despises Jan's weakness -- he often squats in the corner of their farmhouse weeping inconsolably.  Eva blames Jan for not being able to conceive children.  She recalls bitterly a time when they were separated and Jan had love affairs, most notably with an "opera singer" who may have had some kind of venereal disease -- all of this subject matter is broached before the jets spew fire all over the landscape.  Ullman in her memories of the film falsifies it.  She says that the couple was happy before the war ruined their lives.  But this is clearly untrue.  In fact, Bergman's bleak vision is that the conflict between Jan and Eva is just another manifestation of human tendencies toward cruelty and selfishness, the essence of the war around them.  In fact, I would argue that Shame is part of the dream landscape in the earlier films because the war is a pathetic fallacy, that is a vision of their marital conflict writ large and in characters of betrayal, smoke, fire, and rubble.