A Lutheran rural priest performs a mass for a tiny congregation. Afterwards, he is contacted by the troubled wife (Gunnel Lindblom) of a man suffering a severe depression. The man (Max von Sydow) and the priest Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) has a pastoral talk, where, roles inverse, the priest complains his own spiritual agony to his embarrassed guest. The man leaves, and commits suicide immediately. - This trigs a series of discrete but inherently dramatic events and confrontations whereby the priest returns to a cold and sober attitude to his profession, his duties, and his associates. Everything goes back to an unglorious everyday state of things.
This is the film Ingmar Bergman himself is most satisfied with, feeling he finally has managed to be perfectly honest. His preceding film, Though A Glass Darkly, a masterful melodrama with a consolating end: "love demonstrates God's existence", very clearly left Bergman with an uneasy feeling of opportunism and compromise, so here he disowns it, producing the "plain and brutal truth". The Love solution does not work, since love itself is selfish and confused. The illusion of his relationship with a female school teacher Märta (Ingrid Thulin) is mercilessly crushed by Tomas in a direct encounter. Tomas tells Märta he loves only his deceased wife. Towards the end the disillusioned cantor of a neighbouring Church, where Thomans performs a mass for no visitors, however reveals that even this love was not unblemished, since it made Tomas forgetful of his congregation, causing it to melt away.
Now this subtle film is frequently misinterpreted. It's not as grim and depressing as it's told to be. It's theme is disillusion, not despair. Tomas and Märta are hard hit by the sudden crisis; but they can handle it, and quickly return to business-as-usual, and in the gray world of everyday realities, there's considerable relief in the fact life, if rather bleak, isn't really as difficult as those glorious illusions would have made it. God remains silent - but he may still exist, so, just go on with the routine services seems the only viable alternative. And this is what Tomas (and Märta) does; certainly not a hero, nor a scoundrel, just an ordinary, reasonably decent man.
This modest, low-keyed, but very smart and subtle film is the least overtly dramatic Bergman film I have seen, but it's still another towering masterpiece, a Ten; and the photo is as exquisite as ever.
This is the film Ingmar Bergman himself is most satisfied with, feeling he finally has managed to be perfectly honest. His preceding film, Though A Glass Darkly, a masterful melodrama with a consolating end: "love demonstrates God's existence", very clearly left Bergman with an uneasy feeling of opportunism and compromise, so here he disowns it, producing the "plain and brutal truth". The Love solution does not work, since love itself is selfish and confused. The illusion of his relationship with a female school teacher Märta (Ingrid Thulin) is mercilessly crushed by Tomas in a direct encounter. Tomas tells Märta he loves only his deceased wife. Towards the end the disillusioned cantor of a neighbouring Church, where Thomans performs a mass for no visitors, however reveals that even this love was not unblemished, since it made Tomas forgetful of his congregation, causing it to melt away.
Now this subtle film is frequently misinterpreted. It's not as grim and depressing as it's told to be. It's theme is disillusion, not despair. Tomas and Märta are hard hit by the sudden crisis; but they can handle it, and quickly return to business-as-usual, and in the gray world of everyday realities, there's considerable relief in the fact life, if rather bleak, isn't really as difficult as those glorious illusions would have made it. God remains silent - but he may still exist, so, just go on with the routine services seems the only viable alternative. And this is what Tomas (and Märta) does; certainly not a hero, nor a scoundrel, just an ordinary, reasonably decent man.
This modest, low-keyed, but very smart and subtle film is the least overtly dramatic Bergman film I have seen, but it's still another towering masterpiece, a Ten; and the photo is as exquisite as ever.