Years after Ingmar Bergman made Shame, he expressed dissatisfaction with the film. He thought that it could be divided into a first part on war, and a second part on the aftermath. Of the two parts, Bergman said, "In a nightmare, I felt at home. In the reality of war, I was lost." Bergman could not justify the war scenes, but could stand by his work on the scenes that looked at the survivors of war.
Bergman is one of the great directors in terms of conveying a character's psychology, especially through the use of his signature close-ups. In the first part of Shame, we see him abandon his expertise to show how the external realities of war intrude on these psychological spaces and overcome them. Yet in order to be precise, Bergman does not succeed in capturing the external reality of war, but how Jan (Max Von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullman) are unable to make sense of it; that is, unable to organize the sensory details of war.
The film begins in sound (just as it ends in quiet). As the credits roll, there are radio reports and more importantly, radio sounds. An alarm clock breaks in, and the next attention grabbing sound is Eva pulling up the shades that cover the windows as if the show is starting and the stage is outside. Moments later, Jan hears church bells ringing and he asks Eva if there is an occasion. There is no occasion and so the bells have no significance Jan can determine. A phone rings and Eva answers, but no one is on the other line. The church bells continue only to be drowned out by a military convoy. We are not exactly in the external world, but a world filtered through sound, and it is utterly appropriate considering the main characters are members of a disbanded orchestra.
A while later, Jan and Eva are in an antique store to buy a bottle of wine. The owner of the store goes to get the bottle of wine, but leaves an eighteenth century music box playing in the meantime. The camera surveys the items in the antique shop as the music plays. Again, sound is the filter.
The ultimate intrusion of sound comes at the end of the first half of the film (though there is no precise marker between the halves). As bombs go off in Jan and Eva's yard, Jan remarks that he cannot decipher which direction the cacophony is coming from. More remarkably, Eva says something to Jan that is completely drowned out by the bombing. There are not even subtitles here. The sound has has finally achieved its intrusion. After the bombing, Jan and Eva are standing in front of us with alternating camera shots on one or the other to the sound of water dripping. Jan is clutching his violin.
The departure from the deeper psychological elements of existence made Bergman uneasy. In the scene where Eva buys fish, Jan tells her he feels like he has fallen in love with her all over again and that she looks beautiful. Her response is, "When I'm far away, right?" Bergman seems to be mocking his own tendency to explain things from a close-up. Bergman may be right in suspecting that his strength is not in capturing the external reality of war, but he proves masterful in understanding the auditory impression it leaves us with.
IMDb rates this film 8.0 out of 10 stars
Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)
