Carl Theodor Dreyer
Gertrud

'Gertrud' by K. Th. Dreyer (DK 1964): Set in the rigid upper-middle-class Denmark of the early 1900s, this is a highly theatrical exploration of absolute love and solitude that refuses compromises. It offers a take-it-or-leave-it stance, leaving behind the deceptions of sensuality disguised as sublime disinterest—a magnificent and often poetic mask of a need ultimately devoid of dialogue and interest for the other.

The language, somewhat academic and very measured, will most likely be unpalatable for today's viewers, corrupted by the flavor enhancers used nowadays instead of real food. The former opera singer Gertrud, disappointed by her promising and ambitious politician husband, and her dissolute musician lover—both chosen by her with the incomprehensible logic of desire—and the former lover, a great love poet honored with pomp by the University on the very day he realizes he desires her without being able to turn back and when the celebrations of a poetry that has not been lived sound emptier, leaves them all and goes to France to her friend, a Freudian psychologist. The Parisian stay is not shown. She is found at the end of the film, alone, old, but serene and strong for her choice of absoluteness that she has not betrayed, comforted by the friendship of the psychologist, which has never blossomed into anything else, who brings her his latest book as a gift. The fire consumes the letters he wrote to her, so that the things they said belong only to them and the bond they created. It is no longer a destructive fire, a symbol of anger and need, like those that had destroyed the portrait of the former poet lover, by her, and her own, by the former husband. This last fire that burns at the end of life is life itself liberated as much as a man can; life that consumes, but burning gives without fear and without reason.

The poses of the characters are important within the watched and classic frame drawn by the camera that highlights the impossibility of the relationships among them, because, as the perhaps key line of the film states: "There are only the desires of the senses, the rest is the solitude of our souls". Dialogues predominate, the settings are very few and calibrated to the millimeter: Gertrud and her husband's house, the lover's apartment, the University where a solemn rite honors the love poet on the day of his failure, and the house of Gertrud's solitary and serene old age. A splendid figure of a woman with her mistakes, but also her courageous abandonment of a world of cold honesty where words are an easy disguise for feelings not understood in their absoluteness and confused with impulses without real understanding and genuine inter-est for the other. It's easy to say that the purity of feelings clashes with every demand of the so-called civilized living and, ultimately, makes it impossible. But Gertrud has understood and acts accordingly. She has also understood the inconsistency of the disguises of our desires and their extraordinary ability to falsify themselves in splendid garments, but, faithful to her choice to love, she withdraws with dignity, testifying in solitude to her coherence that asks no more.

The last film of a great master, demanding, severe, uncompromisingly Nordic. You will surely sleep, but you will have beautiful dreams.