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Rating: TIMOKA or THE SILENCE.
In a train compartment, returning to their homeland after a vacation abroad, two sisters travel: Ester and Anna, along with Anna's son. The heat is suffocating and causes Anna, already seriously ill, to feel unwell. It becomes urgent to get off the train at the first station and stop at a hotel in the city of Timoka, where a language is spoken that is incomprehensible, even to Anna, who is a translator. Leaving Ester and the son at the hotel, Anna goes to a place where in a corner she sees two people having sex publicly and uninhibitedly. She is aroused and offers herself to the bartender. When Anna's son, Johan, tells Ester that he saw his mother kissing the waiter, Ester breaks down. Anna decides to continue her journey, abandoning her sister to illness and, perhaps, to death. In Johan's hands appears a letter from the aunt in which it says: "For Johan". And the child reads the unknown word: "Hadjek". Which means soul, a recurring word in Bergman's filmography. The third film of the so-called "Religious Trilogy" (or "God Trilogy", or "Silence of God Trilogy"). After "Through a Glass Darkly" and "Winter Light". It lends itself, as usual, being one of Bergman's most complex works, to different interpretations. The one I personally prefer is the autobiographical key. Bergman, as often happens with his works, embarks on a true session of self-psycho-analysis. The two protagonists of the film, Anna and Ester (played respectively by Gunnel Lindblom and Ingrid Thulin) embody two different types of women; two opposing characters that could be contained within a single female figure. Anna is the sensual, corporeal, physical woman. Ester is mentally and intellectually sharp, controlling her instincts, but she is ill, suffering, frail. The opposing characteristics of the two women seem to converge in the personality of the director. They, in turn, embody the feminine side of the maestro: sharp but suffering; psychologically alive but physically tested; intolerant of authority but ethically firm. And, as usual, being a work of Bergman, the film was received at its première with alternating opinions and contrasting criticisms. Some immediately hailed it as a masterpiece, appreciating and praising the powerful, rigid, austere, rigorous style of the narrative. Others cried scandal, due to some scenes very daring by the standards of the time. And indeed the film encountered serious problems on the way to obtaining censorship commission approvals. Some received it with disappointment because they expected Bergman to have made a step forward in the search for God but instead had to reconsider. He had only provided a step forward in human incommunicability. Some criticized it, pointing out its "expressive excesses" and stigmatizing its "expressionist screams". In reality, Bergman seems to state, through the film's dialogues, that those who stray from God, who abandon faith, who lose their spiritual values, abandon themselves to vice, sin, and selfishness. But it cannot be said that he makes, nor that he intends to make, a discourse on God.
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