When the lights came up there was an audible snicker, the friends I was with all kinda shrugged and the old woman in the hat said, “the story was shit!” but I’m gonna stand my ground. Many of Bergman’s films leave themselves open to cries of The Emperor’s New Clothes, but none so much as this one. Heck, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton’s characters nearly came to blows over it in the movie Manhattan.
Ambiguous and frustrating, yes, but (and this is key) never boring. At 93 minutes and gorgeously shot in shimmering black and white (take that, Inland Empire) this nearly dialogue-free quasi-narrative wavers from surrealism to precise mundanity. The story that is there is, indeed, worth puzzling over and the proof is in the spellbinding quality of the formalism surrounding it. The sound design, the camera moves, the glimpses from multiple perspectives. Are they sisters or lovers? Is the world at war? Is she really dying? Why so naked around the kid? Those sunglasses are awesome, where can I get a pair? Is that a Hershey bar?
There are no shortage of hallways, mirrors, broken (and repaired) illumination sources and language barriers to keep those who want to argue psychological symbolic imagery busy all night long (hopefully in a turtleneck sweater at the coed dorm with Schoenberg or maybe Brubeck playing, Franz Kline print next to the window as snow slowly falls. . . . )
