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A newspaper headline sets the stage, "scandal in the world of medicine," schizophrenia is the subject of dueling treatises. The doctor (Georg Rydeberg) is accused of plagiarism by the older academic, his wife (Wanda Rothgardt) is by his side in the apartment over the course of a most eventful day. The radio announces the rival's death, suicide or murder? "Not if he can prove his innocence... Can you?" Carl Theodor Dreyer in a Stockholm studio, beset by issues—he wanted a sensitive leading man and a spitfire and got Bela Lugosi and a jellyfish, an insistent score was poured over the drama without his approval, the results were disowned and unreleased. So much for the perfect midpoint of the auteur's oeuvre, a recomposition of The President in an outline of the Gertrud style, superb from first to last. Even more than Day of Wrath, a vision of the war: The married protagonists move like conspirators in and out of the gloom of their living room, the outside world is a welter of disembodied voices and footsteps sensed through drawn curtains. A dance, a lullaby, the makeshift portrait of a couple before a mirror. "Just as we were daydreaming," suspicion and tragedy, "we infected each other." Purposely mismatched edits to jar the gliding camera, a certain Hitchcock vein (Blackmail, mainly). Bloodied handkerchief and tell-tale glove, revelation of the affair and confession of the crime, all grist for Dreyer's experimental mill. Beethoven's 7th, a cameo from the Vampyr shadow, the ultimate, lyrical release of poison. "I want to die, because I cannot live without loving." Tolling bells and police sirens mingle for the farewell melody. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |