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Frosted glass doors bracket the tale, the maternity ward as confessional: "Not only wombs are forced open here, but the whole person, too." The main image is one of flesh and sterility, within the blank walls are plastic dolls and metallic instruments and a trio of bravura actresses expressing Ingmar Bergman's terror and awe of birth. Sweaty and contorted on a gurney, the secretary (Ingrid Thulin) suffers through a bloody miscarriage; afterward, she vociferates at the head nurse (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs) in a fulminating aria, her face isolated in close-up by the whiteness of bedsheets, "no nausea, only a tremendous clarity." (Lack of love is at the root, the shriveled spawn of a frigid marriage.) The housewife (Eva Dahlbeck) giggles at coos at her own swollen belly until a morbid Bible verse chills her to the bone, meanwhile the ponytailed runaway (Bibi Andersson) gazes at the squalling newborns and feels only repulsion. A joyous miracle to one, "a big clump that sucks all my blood" to the other. The beginning after the end (The Seventh Seal), visiting hours and revelatory bouts in a corner of the hospital. Women are anguished life-bearers in the cell-like chamber, combing each other's hair and helping apply makeup and waking up after midnight to share jokes and fears. The menfolk are severe (Erland Josephson) or earnest (Max von Sydow) or a brusque voice on the phone, the doctor (Gunnar Sjöberg) is as impotent as the pastor in Winter Light when asked about life's mysteries. Stevens' Vigil in the Night for the ambiance, Dreyer's Ordet for the delivery-table Calvary, out of it all Bergman fashions an abstraction akin to Miró's. The "purity of line" noted in Truffaut's review carries into the next decade, intensified. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |