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Rating: The Face, The Mask, The Mirror.
The face is undoubtedly the most enigmatic among all those of the Swedish master. In it, the director appears suspended between the rationalism, the enlightenment and the positivism of the scientist Vergerus and the magical practices of the hypnotic Vogler. Ending up portraying faithfully what truly occurred in old Europe in the mid-19th century. Not by chance, Ingmar Bergman carefully chooses the setting: he does so precisely because he wants to depict the mental attitude that even the most cultured people of the time practiced: on one hand advocating the new scientific disciplines, on the other winking both at traditional magic, a legacy of darker years, and at the new practices of mesmerism. Vergerus, a scientist and positivist, on one side; Vogler, a hypnotist and mesmerist, on the other, embody the waiting and indecisive position, in a word, the equilibrium, of Ingmar Bergman. Which, then, is also common to many rationalist intellectuals of that era. The face is a film made up of dark moments, skillfully alternated with flashes of pure comedy. As happens at the end of the film, for example, with the cheerful carousel of comedians and guards chasing each other through the palace's staircases, against a bright musical backdrop. The film has divided admirers of Ingmar Bergman's cinema: some of them preferred it to The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. I, for one, am not among them. Ingmar Bergman has wonderfully continued in his diversion made of dualisms and oppositions. Without ever indicating where the reason lies, indeed scrambling the cards; and without having the ambition to indicate on which side good lies and on which side evil, sometimes even confusing them. It cannot be claimed that he has once again been able to explain what it means to desire, love, marry, sexually unite, magnetically attract different sexes. He has recounted love in its different facets: the silent, devoted marital love of Vogler and his wife; the unconsummated marriage of Consul Egerman and his wife, who have not lain together since the death of their daughter; the youthful love between Simson and Sara; the mature love between Tubal and Sofia. He brilliantly succeeded in contrasting being and appearing: as will happen a few years later in Persona, here too the consul's wife mistakes Vogler for her husband. He managed to play with mirrors, with faces and their expressions, with masks: a game that is always congenial to him when he uses the... magic lantern. He has once again mocked the art of acting and the medical-scientific professions. He posed a series of questions and then, with his usual ease, disregarded the answers, indeed waiting for the viewer to seek them on their own. He also tried to film the supreme moment of death; to capture the fleeting moment of the last passage which he was obsessed with throughout almost his entire life. And who, better than Dr. Vogler, could better gather this eloquent, masterful thanatological testimony? But not even he, the Genius of Uppsala, who spent his entire activity trying to seize the moment, to study its causes, to investigate its fears, has ever succeeded in unveiling the supreme secret; the human, unfathomable mystery of life and death. Even less getting close to it.
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