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Rating: The Place of the Soul.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
The film is a meditation, serene yet profound, on life and death. Life is heavy, as is the looming daily idea of death on it and on men. Bergman, in some way attempts, and somehow succeeds, to “revolutionize” the conventional idea of the unsolvable mystery of life and death, essentially showing that life and death are not so different, indeed, opposed, as one tends to believe. They are intertwined, made almost of the same substance. In practice, he demonstrates that merely existing is not enough to be truly alive. One can feel dead while being alive. (“I am dead even though I am alive,” says Isaak Borg, the seventy-year-old doctor, protagonist). One can be reborn to a new life, in a word: (re)live, even by dying. But the film is also a story of conversion and redemption: at the end of the journey, at the end of the film, Isak Borg is not the same man who left Stockholm in the morning. The cold and insensitive man; selfish and solitary. He is a new man, different, who (re)births into a new life...dying. And it is also a film about nostalgia (nostos = return – algos = pain, pain of...return) and youth. Finally, it is a film about affections as the primary value of existence. Bergman in Isak Borg. Bergman identifies first and foremost with the old protagonist Isak Borg. The doctor is about to celebrate the jubilee of his medical profession. As he reaches the end of his career and, presumably, his life, he embarks on a car journey from Stockholm to Lund, which is also a “time travel,” a journey through the most heartfelt memories of his life; a journey of “redemption” at the end of which, having realized all his human limitations and his mistakes in interpersonal relationships, he will have, serenely, moved closer to death, but also to full human redemption. He will have reconciled first with himself, admitting his mistakes, and then with others: his daughter-in-law Marianne and, above all, his son Evald, with whom he has almost never been able to maintain a true and factual dialogue. Isak Borg begins the journey with the burden of his selfishness, his indifference, his inability to understand others, starting with his son Evald who respects him, but secretly hates him, as confided by daughter-in-law Marianne; to continue with the daughter-in-law Marianne, with whom he almost doesn't speak; to continue further with his housekeeper Agda, with whom he has continuous verbal clashes, continuous bickering. Only at the end of the film, hence the journey, does he experience a moment of intense and delicate intimacy, a moment of true humanity and sweetness, perhaps the first of his entire life. But, probably also the last. From the original screenplay of the film: ...Marianne approached me. She smelled nice and made a gentle, feminine rustling sound. She leaned over me. Then the dialogue: brief, but significant and intense. - Isak: “Thank you for your company during the journey.” - Marianne: “Thank you too.” - Isak: “I care a lot about you, Marianne.” - Marianne: “I care about you too, Daddy Isak.”
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