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"Start out beautifully yet end in misery," Good Friday in other words. As in The Seventh Seal, the emphasis on textures and lines evokes woodcuts, to which Ingmar Bergman adds diffused Millet lighting. (The slimy frog in the bread gives another stylistic encapsulation.) Contrasting maidens—the dark servant in the shack (Gunnel Lindblom), scraggly, pregnant, praying to Odin, versus the daughter of the house (Birgitta Pettersson) smugly basking in her golden wholesomeness. Father (Max von Sydow) and Mother (Birgitta Valberg) compete to see who can spoil her more, she's dressed to the nines for her ride to church. The sunny forest darkens, the Summer Interlude cuckoo yields to a cawing raven, there's even a river troll. So sheltered that she describes a trio of baleful goatherds (Axel Düberg, Tor Isedal, Ove Porath) as "enchanted princes," she's raped and killed as Nature weeps leaves and petals. "Bastards beget bastards," the spiral of vengeance. Between Rashomon and Deliverance, the cruelest violation contemplated by Bergman at his starkest. A circular medieval simplicity, the culprits as unwitting guests at the farm of the victim's parents, the shaken boy who cannot keep his dinner down. The wandering beggar (Allan Edwall) has seen the grand cathedrals of the world, and has a tale about "the furnace that swallows up murderers and evildoers" at nightfall. Day of Wrath ambiguity enhances the schematic view, the hint of incestuous desire in patriarchal devotion or the irruption of pagan rituals in the pious household. Knives and fire for the retribution, "a fitting reward." The miracle is "water where there wasn't," as Peckinpah's Cable Hogue would have it, filmed with appropriate emptiness by a skeptic auteur. Craven's grindhouse analysis comes in due time. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. With Axel Slangus, Gudrun Brost, and Oscar Ljung. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |