The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

The Royal Tenenbaums is a story of five psychologically unstable and immensely melancholic individuals. The Tenenbaums own a gigantic house in New York. The patriarch is the Royal Tenenbaum who has left his family behind and leaves in a rented hotel room with his loyal attendant Pagan (who once tried to kill Royal in India), essentially on credit. His wife Etheline, who has an African-American accountant-cum-suitor, looks after the three gifted children, but all of them have turned into neurotic adults. Chas was a financial virtuoso as a kid who has lost her wife in a plane crash and since then has become hysterical about his two children's safety. Margot was adopted who had won a big literary prize as a kid and is caught in a loveless marriage with a psychiatrist with no offspring. Richie was once a tennis champion in the international circuit who threw away his career and secretly harbors a deep love for Margot. All of them live in the mansion except Royal Tenenbaum. Their most prominent neighbor is Eli who writes best-selling Westerns that receive terrible reviews and who is also in love with Margot. Even though they share the mansion, each of them is an island in itself. Eccentric behavior of each Tenenbaum covers a grave sense of loneliness. Amid all these, Royal Tennebaum fakes cancer during a dinner-table conversation seemingly in a bid to get close to his three children and win back his estranged wife. Some of the Tenenbaums respond with pity and arrange for Royal to stay with them. However, Etheline's suitor reveals in a spell of jealousy that Royal has been untruthful about his illness, which causes an immediate eviction of Royal from the family home. After a string of bizarre events, everything falls into the right place: Etheline and her suitor take the vow, Richie and Margot reveal their love for each other, for the first time in the family history Chass displays emotion and love for his father and lets go of his OCD regarding safety concerns, Eli accepts his mediocrity and renounces his love for Margot, Margot's husband writes a famous book on one of his patient's delusions, and Royal Tenenbaum passes away, peacefully. Nobody knows of Pagan, though. Wes Anderson's film is an uncommon combination of comedy and sadness. There are situations that produce big laughter and there are moments of quietness. But just when a contemplative and gloomy scene evokes sentimentality on the screen, Anderson suffuses the scene with edgy comedy or sarcasm. This queer juxtaposition of sorrow and humor has always been a defining feature of all of Anderson's works. Characters in Anderson's films almost always verge on the eccentric side of the persona and all of them suffer from a collective delusion out of which an orderliness emerges. The Royal Tetenbaums is no exception. The movie is effortlessly funny, flagrantly peculiar, and emotionally uncertain. At a fundamental level, the film documents a broken family's preposterous effort to carve out strategies to find emotional connectivity and strange characters' outlandish mannerisms to hide their emotional loneliness.

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

Wild Strawberries is a humane reflection on age, lost love, emotional vacuity, and existential guilt. The film interweaves personal memories, dreams, and nightmares with the present to furnish magnificent images that became hallmark of art house films dwelling upon acute nostalgia. The film is about Isak Borg who is a lonely man standing at 78. Isak is a widower; an acclaimed medical professional; has a married son who has distanced himself from Isak due to strained financial relationship; and lives with an old maid with whom he has a rather childish run-in bond. The film opens with an analytically viable (known from a later scene where Isak visits his mother and discovers his father's handless clock), visibly opulent, and a poetic dream scene with its manifest symbolism of handless clocks, lifeless human existence, beating and stopping of clocks, and an alive Isak inside a coffin, all of which announce the end-of-life crisis in which Isak finds himself. The plot of the film is a series of dreams strung together like beads on a strand and passed through Isak's mind as he journeys onward to receive a honorary degree at the Lund University. And during this journey Isak regresses back to all sorts of memories and dreams that associate with his past life. The film is laced with a voiceover of Isak who reminisces about his childhod house, his girlfriend Sara who married Isak's rather debonair brother Sigfrid, and a few other things of mortal importance. In his road trip, he is accompanied by a young girl who resembles Sara, her two suitors, and Isak's daughter-in-law Marianne. The five people in the car are also, to me, symbolic figures:Isak Borg may be Ingmar Bergman himself. Sara is Bergman's yearning for youth, virginity, and more importantly lost love. Anders, one of the two suitors, is Bergman's spiritual and artistic side that is interested in the existence of god. Victor, the other suitor, is Bergman's intellect steeped in strict rationalism. Marianne can be construed as Bergman's conscience. And the car-trip itself is a symbol of Bergman's own past life passing by the side windows.
One common misinterpretation of Isak's character by many film critics is that Isak is emotionally frigid. However, in the film we see no evidence that may justify such a conclusion. Isak is accused by others of being cold, selfish, and unsympathetic. These interpretations, however, do not mesh well with an unprejudiced analysis of Isak's character. He comes off as a sweet old man, one who seems merely deeply passionate, yet unable to express himself. In this review, I will attempt to lay out the evidence by carefully analyzing Isak's interactions with some of the characters from the film, which would defy such a flawed portrayal of Isak.

The first piece of evidence comes from a scene, later in the film, the second dream sequence that reveals that Isak is viewed by Sara as rather sensitive, shy, and prudish as opposed to unemotional and cold. In that dream sequence, Sara reflects to Charlotta on her relationship with Isak:

Sara: Isak is so refined. He is so enormously refined and moral and sensitive and he wants us to read poetry together and he talks about the after-life and wants to play duets on the piano and he likes to kiss only in the dark and he talks about sinfullness. I think he is extremely intellectual and morally aloof and I feel so worthless, and I am so worthless, you can't deny that. But sometimes I get the feeling that I'm much older than Isak, do you know what I mean? And then I think he's a child even if we are the same age, and then Sigfrid is so fresh and exciting and I want to go home.

To provide further testimony to the fact that Isak is shy or moralistic in sexual matters, Isak's relationship with his old domestic, Miss Agda, is a case in point. Their relation belies a true affection, if not sexual attraction. Early on in the film Agda thanks heavens that two of them are boss and employee and not husband and wife, and we sense a deep bond between them. By the film’s end, there is a suggestion that even Miss Agda has always wanted something more from Isak.When, at his son’s house, Agda suggests that her bedroom door is always open, should he need something. That in the forty or so years of their relationship they have never gotten beyond calling each other ‘Professor’ and ‘Miss’, much less entered into a sexual relationship, does not imply that Borg is cold and unfeeling, merely prudish and shy or both.
Thus a more legitimate interpretation, it seems, is that Isak has simply invested too much into others’ interpretations of his conduct and emotionally pays for it. In general, it seems that Isak suffers from naïvete in life. In one of the dream sequences, when Isak dreams of watching his dead wife Karin cuckold him, he hears her sarcasm of his expected reaction to her dalliance, and censures his lack of resentment and jealousy over it. Isak is told that he has been accused by his wife of "indifference, selfishness, lack of consideration." He is led by Alman to a court-like clearing in which he sees his wife and her lover. Afterward, Alman says:

"Many men forget a woman who has been dead for thirty years. Some preserve a sweet, fading picture, but you can always recall this scene in your memory. Strange, isn't it?"


Yet, we viewers never really know if this act was really an extreme import. The fact is that Isak recalls the exact date of his wife’s infidelity mainly runs counter to the notion that he was unfeeling over it, that he would try to impute blame upon the victimized, himself. From all of these, it seems far more likely to me that Isak’s real existential predicament in this film is not that he ever was a frigid individual. For the worst accusation emerges when Marianne complains of his merely asking his doctor son Evald to repay some debts to him. A dispassionate analysis would, however, suggest that Isak is far from being a tyrant, and rather merely a man trying to hold his grown son to his own words. Marianne, who seems to have bought into others’ interpretations of her father-in-law also finally overcomes such an attitude in the course of the film and finally develops a deep affection for him, despite her initial scorn, including telling Isak his son hates him.

On his way down to the University of Lund to get his honorary degree, Isak stops near his family’s old summer home, pays a visit to his really old and unemotional mother, and stops for a gas refill in a town where Isak used to live during his medical internship. These events shed important light on Isak's psychological map. His stop at his old summerhouse brings him back to a patch of Wild Strawberries that trigger his journey back to his childhood, and lends the film its title. The scenes where Isak loses Sara to Sigfrid are deeply resonant for a viewer and infuse an empathetic mood in the viewer for Isak's loss of love and, more importantly, uncover a deep sentimentalism in his character.  On his way, Isak arrives at his old town, and is warmly greeted by the local gas station attendant, Henrik from whom we hear some of the good deeds and favors Isak the doctor is fondly recalled for in the village, even many years later. This positive scene lies in stark contrast to others' misinterpretations of Isak's character. Leaving Sara and her two suitors behind, Marianne and Isak pay a quick visit to Isak's 96 year old mother. Here the viewer gets some clear evidence of the biases with which others' analyze Isak. In a famous moment, Isak’s mother neglects Isak and his siblings' old photos and makes a rather offensive comment that they only visit her when they need money, and even mistakes Marianne for Isak’s long dead wife, Karin, whom she manifestly loathed. Yet, in the whole scene all we see is how Isak treasures those childhood mementos, and takes offense to his mother's remark. Likewise when he goes to visit his mother on the trip; he doesn't really want to be there because it reminds him of his own strained relationship with his son that seems to be a formality at best. Also, in his trip Marianne becomes frustrated at the quarreling couple and asks them to leave and Isak does not object to that. As if he really wants to avoid those events from his life that are unpleasant and reek of conjugal bickering. All of these hardly fit into the archetype of coldness that others accuse Isak of. 
Most critics seem to have bought into the fact that the Isak is cold, yet little evidence of this is seen. One might argue that the whole tale is a flashback by Isak, who consciously or not is trying to guide the viewer to believe what he believes, yet, even if true, this only reinforces the notion that Isak has been grandly deluded by others into buying into a false notion of himself. Those folks, like Henrik, who has no agenda with Isak, see him in a far different light than those who have something to gain from him do. Indeed, the central dilemma of the film seems not to be how Isak comes to grips with his own objective failures as a human being, but rather how he comes to balance others’ flawed perceptions of himself with a growing sense by himself of who he really is, and has been.

As the film ends, the ceremony is done, and Isak waves to the kids as they leave. He has had another bittersweet argument with Agda, and seems reconciled with himself, ending with a dream sequence of seeing his parents on a far shore of the lake near their summer home. In his mind, all is bliss, for his remaining days are now not turbid with doubt, and even his son and Marianne seem to have reconciled, after a brief moment with both where Isak has had his say. 
What Wild Strawberries cinematically achieves is a melancholy statement about life. Wild Strawberries emerges as one of the Swedish director's most elegiac and humane films. It builds, through its flashback structure, a compassionate portrait of a man coming to terms with the disappointments and sorrows of an emotionally constrained life.

Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978)

Autumn Sonata is a poignant and intensely probing film about the intricacies of familial relationships. Eva is a faint-hearted, muted, and brittle wife of a country parson, who has invited her mother, Charlotte to stay with her after a separation of seven years. Charlotte is an acclaimed concert pianist, whose career has dictated prolonged separations from her family, afforded her opportunities of indulging in extramarital relationships, and all these in turn have inflicted severe psychological and physical damages on her two daughters. Helena, the other daughter of Charlotte, is bed-ridden with a disease of physiological decay, who had developed a physical relationship with Charlotte's former but now dead boyfriend. While Eva wants to confront her mother, having recently experienced the death of her husband, Charlotte is eager to renew her relationship with her daughter. Due to Eva's confrontations with her mother, their congenial reunion is going to be short-lived and full of familiar emotional landscapes - guilt, regrets, and pain. The most dramatic moments of the film centers on the fragile and emotionally charged scene that is at the heart of this film. It is an exploration of guilt, regret, and pain. Eva's faceoff with her mother leads to a verbal catharsis - the ineluctable release of long harbored frustration, accusations, and anger. The scene, and indeed the film itself, underscores the need for acceptance and connection. Bergman uses thematic colors that permeate the film. In Autumn Sonata, the thematic color is fittingly fall: pumpkin orange and fading yellows. The theme is especially appropriate for the story of a mother in the twilight of her career who is seeking reconciliation and closure. It also creates an atmosphere that is warm and inviting, a woman coming home at the end of her journey. It is, however, a journey that has only begun.

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The Seventh Seal is poetic, existential, grim, somber, witty, and on the whole a medieval treatment of an eternally relevant curiosity of human race - the existence of god and the inevitability of death. It draws up a desirous balance of solemn and the carefree, the harsh and the satirical. A medieval knight named Antonius Block and his squire Jöns have just returned from ten wasted years in the Crusades to a Sweden in the throes of the black plague. Block is the most philosophical, perceptive, and inquisitive character who is never tired of seeking answer to an ever-contemporaneous inquiry into the existence of god. Jöns is verging on the cynical side of the inquiry, maintains an expression of scornful derision toward Block, and most prominently a strict enforcer of civil rules. 
We also meet a simple actor named Jof who holds a simple vision of life and a believer in the god, his wife Mia radiating eternal love and affection, and their infant son Mikael, a metaphoric object of future and hope. Vacillating between his inability to believe and his dissatisfaction with unbelief, Block fulminates against God’s frustrating elusiveness on the one hand and the God-shaped hole in his own heart on the other. "Why must he always hide behind unseen miracles and vague promises and hints about eternity?" Block complains. Yet he also asks, "Why can’t I kill God within me? Why does he live on inside me, mocking and tormenting me till I have no rest, even though I curse him and try to tear him from my heart? Why, in spite of everything else, does he remain a reality — a maddening reality I cannot get rid of?" Besides struggling with doubts about God’s existence, Block also resists death in the hope of performing a single meaningful act before dying. He challenges Death, the grim reaper, in a game of chess only to temporize his search for god. The reprieve is granted by Death who intermittently engages in his usual pitiless acts to remind us the inevitability of him. Block does get an opportunity to perform his meaningful act before the film ends — even in a way cheating Death — ultimately this gives him no consolation or peace. Instead, his only respite from his existential dread occurs, notably, during an encounter with the playful couple, Jof and Mia, in which Block briefly shares in their peaceful existence, enjoying a simple meal of wild strawberries and milk. In final, Block and his company with the exception of Jof, Mia, and Mikael accept lurking Death in a moment of submission. In The Seventh Seal, Bergman scrutinizes life and death as a philosophical problem rather than living it as a man. He portrays agnosticism and existential angst with recognized expressions of excitements, but allows religious allegiance to appear only in archaic and repulsive forms. Throughout the film, each encounter with Death gives way to an earthy humorous episode reminding us the endless proceedings of a mundane life. Like Block, Bergman never attempts to enter into Jof and Mia’s uncomplicated way of life, yet still somehow seems to draw comfort from it. By the film’s end it’s clear that although the director has no wish to be like Jof and Mia, he nevertheless values their way of life and doesn’t wish to see them deprived of it. Bergman expresses his impression of Death in the following:
"I was afraid of this enormous emptiness, but my personal view is that when we die, we die, and we go from a state of something to a state of absolute nothingness; and I don’t believe for a second that there’s anything above or beyond or anything like that; and this makes me enormously secure."

The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

A group of three passengers, traveling in a train cabin that evokes the image of sweltering afternoon heat, are heading to an unknown city that is caught preparing for an impending war. A sickly translator, Esther, her sister Anna, a curvaceous woman preoccupied with corporal ambitions, and Anna's son Johan, an embodiment of purity. Suffering from a respiratory condition, Esther checks into a hotel room, while Anna and Johan occupying the adjacent suite. Soon, Esther's excessive attachment proves too suffocating for the sensual Anna, who walks out for a nightly adventure. The bedridden Esther overindulges herself with tobacco and alcohol in a vain attempt to subdue her loneliness. Johan is left to his own "strangeland" where he wanders through the near deserted hotel, encountering an elderly kindhearted hotel manager, and a band of dwarfs from a circus company. Johan who initially keeps a respectable distant from his ailing aunt gradually develops an empathy for her, drawn together by their mutual love for Anna and sense of solitude. On the final day of return, still unable to travel, Esther hands over Johan a letter containing a list of translations of foreign words for their journey. Anna and Johan leave behind ailing Esther in the desolate hotel and take a train homebound. The Silence is Bergman's last installment in his "God" trilogy, and arguably the most metaphysical and agnostic film of the trilogy. As Through A Glass Darkly equated human holiness with god, Winter Light analyzed spiritual bankruptcy, The Silence is an examination of emotional isolation in a world devoid of any God - where redemption lies in human connectedness the lack of which leads to wretched conditions. Allegorically, Esther has intelligent faculties at her disposal to communicate, but physical deficiency, fear of rejection by dear ones, and a sense of supremacy prevent her from being understood. Anna, on the other hand, perceives physical contact as a substitute for emotional intimacy, realizes the limitations of her understanding of communication, and is ultimately drawn to a state of emotional isolation. Johan's immature absorption of Esther and Anna's ideas leads him to tilt towards Esther, apparently. Bergman conveys alienation through spatial disconnectedness, partitioning physical space, darkness, sharp light angles, and scarcity of words. The use of mirrors creates a sense of distance between characters and the images in the mirrors further accentuate a sense of emptiness in characters. Note the scene that shows Esther observing Anna's reflection from the adjoining room as she washes her face, suggesting the ruptured intimacy between them. After a prolonged, asthma attack, Esther beseeches God to allow her to die in her own land. In the end, she is left behind by Anna and Johan to die in an abandoned hotel room in a strange land, Alone and forsaken:silenced by a conspicuous absence of God.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

A communion is meticulously performed before a dwindling congregation: a school teacher, Marta, a troubled parishioner, Jonas Persson and Jonas' wife, Karin. But the religious ceremony has lost its significance for its message-bearer, pastor Tomas, who has a crisis of faith. Tomas's inner predicament is fittingly captured by a series of close ups, a characteristic of Bergman's cinematic signature. Tomas is callous and uncaring to the woman, Marta, who loves him. His interactions with Marta are mostly mechanical and ultimately acrimonious. When an apprehensive and suicidal Jonas seeks peace on a perceived imminent nuclear holocaust, equivocating Tomas offers his own uncertainty. Jonas gives in to the internal crisis, laden with faith, and commits suicide. The most bare and visually somber of Ingmar Bergman's religious trilogy, Winter Light, the second film of the trilogy, is a film in transition. It marks Bergman's final exploration of religious faith, or of the reasons to doubt the lack thereof, and serves as an overture to the psychological drama, the last part of his trilogy. Similar to Through a Glass Darkly, minimal cast, dialogue, and scenery suffuse the film, squeezing out the atmospheric tensions of the plot to its fundamental essence: God's silence. The unique use of monologues, elongated silences, and extreme close-ups convey emotional plights of the characters and paint a picture of emotional isolation. In perfect harmony are the barren landscape, seasonal climate, and Tomas' illness that further reflect the cold emptiness of his soul. In the final scene, Tomas returns to the obligation of the ceremonial communion attended by a meager  mass. Tomas is seen to minister the vacant words for those who solicit comfort from their lofty meaning, extract from them stamina for their spiritual solace and emotional composure.

Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961)

Four figures come into focus from a water thin horizon, moving toward the shore of an apparently uninhabited island: David, a struggling writer, his adolescent son, Minus, his psychologically tenuous daughter, Karin, and Karin's husband, Martin. All the family members have gathered at the remote island in order to facilitate Karin's recovery from a previous nervous breakdown. David is the most self-absorbed character whose literary struggle has distanced him from his dear ones. David studies Karin with a clinical detachment of a psychological experiment. David is aware of his behavior and his emotional honesty and compunction is profoundly framed in a shattering scene where David cries uncontrollably in a dark room upon realizing how distant he and his children have grown. Martin is the least confused character who is visibly concerned with Karin's well-being, but fails to discharge his sexual energy due to Karin's convalescing conditions. Minus, the most virginal of all, is preoccupied with his own sexual awakening, and uses Karin as a convenient source of female psyche. Minus' emotional closeness to his sister is aptly captured by his plea to the God as he retrieves a blanket for Karin. Karin is the most religious, whose character is represented as an important link between religious devoutness and psychotic delusion. Like most Bergman films, Through a Glass Darkly is a sketch of emotional loneliness, social alienation, and the process of seeking of the God or love, as Bergman would propose.  Through a Glass Darkly is the first film of Ingmar Bergman's religious trilogy, in which the director, in my opinion, establishes the notion of God as a symbol of love, a savior during moments of personal emotional crisis. And this love exists in human connections and familial closeness. This basic theme is represented in the form of the character of David, who realizes after a botched suicide attempt that “God is love”.The film is visually frugal, dark, crisp, and sometimes allegorical. Karin's mental disintegration inside the hull of a shipwreck, symbolizes the tormented soul of Karin. It is a brooding and highly personal film for Bergman whose struggle with his own religious identity and upbringing are supposedly instrumental behind this creative effort. The film's essence is captured when David tells Minus: "I don't know if love proves God's existence, or love is God Himself." In the end, Karin sees God behind the closet door - a stony spider god - a painful allegory of her own family's illusory love.

A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergmann

In 1963 Bergman published the screenplays for Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence in a single volume. In an introductory note the director gave his reasons for uniting the three films, a rationale that has influenced their reception over the past fifty years, Bergman wrote: "These three films deal with reduction. Through A Glass Darkly - conquered certainty. Winter Light - penetrated certainty. The Silence - God's silence - the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy." Film critics and historians absorbed this construct into their reviews and essays for years. In his 1969 analysis of Bergman's films, titled Ingmar Bergman, Robin Wood grouped the three films under the chapter heading " The Trilogy", without further mention of the concept. Others' greeted Bergman's statement more skeptically. Despite the fact that some critics felt the idea of a trilogy was rationalization after the fact, there is evidence that Bergman had considered the films a trilogy all along. Decades later Bergman recanted. In 1999, the director collaborated with film critic and friend Lasse Bergstrom to review all of his films. What resulted from these sessions is Images: a book of Bergman's personal reflections on his life's works. After almost thirty years of recognizing the trilogy as a trilogy, Bergman shifted his opinion: "Today I feel that the "trilogy" has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnaps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol, not always holding up when examined in the sober light of day." Now film scholars, and Bergman's loyal audience are faced with the challenge of reconciling the director's two conflicting statements of intent, one made in the throes of creation, the other at a distance of decades. Despite Bergman's skepticism, however, the idea of the trilogy is permanenetly ingrained in the critical discourse that his work has inspired.

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

This film is based on a real-life incident in the New York City, and Hitchcock's first flight to believably portray a real-life event on the silver screen. A musician when back from his work on a fateful night is accosted by men who dragged him to a number of different  places. In each place they asked, "Is this the man? Is this the man?"He was then arrested for several robberies. Although he was completely innocent, he had to go through a trial, and by its end his wife had lost her mind. During the legal proceedings, a small infringement of the ritual caused a mistrial. As the preparations for a new trial were being made, the real culprit was arrested and he confessed. The film was shown from the point of view of the innocent man. Hitchcock has never been more himself than in this film, which nevertheless runs the risk of disappointing lovers of suspense and of English humor. There is very little suspense in it and there is no humor. The Wrong Man is Hitchcock's most stripped-down film. It is the roast without the gravy. The film is shot inexpensively in the street, subway, the places where the action really occurred. It;s because he knew that he was making a difficult and relatively less commercial film than he usually does. His concern was visible when he warned us before the title of the film was showed that what he was offering this time was something different, a drama based on fact. Henry Fonda is impressive, expressionless, almost immobile. Fonda is only a look. Never was Fonda so fine, so grand, and noble as in this film where he has only to present his honest man's face, just barely lit with a sad, an almost transparent, expression. Hitchcock almost made it impossible for the spectator to identify with the drama's hero; we are limited to the role of witnesses. We are at Fonda's side throughout, in his cell, in his home, in the car, on the street, but we are never in his place. That is an innovation in Hitchcock's work, since the suspense of his other films was based precisely on identification. The film's climax is based on a coincidence that makes scrupulous screenwriters scream. That is, when Fonda cannot prove his innocence, his mother tells him: "You should pray." So Fonda kneels down before a statue of Jesus Christ and prays. There is a close-up of Christ, a dissolve, and then a shot in the street that shows a man who resembles Fonda walking toward the camera until the frame catches him in a close-up with his face and Fonda's superimposed. This is certainly the most beautiful shot in the film and it summarizes all of it. It is the transfer of culpability, the theme of the double, a theme present if many of Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock offers a film about the role of an accused man, and the fragility of human testimony and justice. It has nothing in common with the actual incident of the New York City except its pessimism, appearance, and skepticism. In any case, it is one of Hitchcock's best films, the one that goes farthest in the direction he chose long ago.

The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Two women, Anna and Ester, accompanied by Johan, Anna's ten-year-old son, travel slowly through the night by train into a foreign country that seems to be at war. We will never discover the reason for their journey, to a place where the inhabitants, the culture, and the language are unknown to them. Perhaps it is to pare down or discard normal trappings of their lives, to take the consequences of who they turn out to be. In The Silence Bergman has shifted focus from God to people, from theology to psychology. But ideas are inert without visual expressions, and it is Bergman's genius to invite us, through extreme close-ups, to enter the mystery of people, of their faces. This preoccupation with faces, what they reveal and what they hide, is enhanced in The Silence. The unfathomable silence of the city has reduced the adults in the triangle to an almost zero level of communication with the outside world. Every personal connection is oblique and truncated, creating an ominous atmosphere in which gestures and symbols are often fugitive or vaguely menacing. For the young and curious Johan, wandering the corridors of the strangely vacant hotel, the brooding foreign city is merely the shell of an adult world whose impenetrable emotional climate is determined by his mother and aunt. Anna and Ester form two sides of a whole person. Anna is defined almost entirely through her physicality - washing, anointing herself with perfume and lotions, getting dressed and undressed, having sex, watching others have sex. Ester, the translator, with her typewriter, paper, and pens, is instead a creature of languages - suffering from the lung disease that suffocates her, masturbating, smoking, drinking, and thinking of sex as a mechanical matter of "erections and secretions" that disgust her.  Her body in ruin, only words have seem to kept her alive. Amid the noise, music, and silence that layer the soundtrack, Anna and Ester are locked in a cryptic struggle that plays out before Johan's eyes and in his feelings. The lessons of life are to be learned from the lives of women. Although we see many things that he does not, Johan is the spine of the film. It is the movement of his sympathies from his seductive mother to his intellectual, ailing aunt that gives coherence and force to Bergman's meditation on human frailty.