Heroic Despair

On the structure of 20th century religious thought, the works of Ingmar Bergman perch like gargoyles. Their gnostic faith belongs to no known dogma; their acrid doubt is too large to sit in the cool shade of existentialism. The Shame, latest of his grotesqueries, once again prays to a dead God, once again mixes actuality and surrealism, calamity and humor, a fertile mind and an arid soul.

The year is 1971, and the scene is Bergman's favorite symbol: an island off the coast. There, a violinist named Jan Rosenberg (Max von Sydow) and his wife Eva (Liv Ullman) cower in their farmhouse, waiting out a civil war that rages on the mainland. It is a truism that in many childless marriages one of the couple assumes the role of the baby. In the Rosenbergs' case, it is Jan, cosseted and petted by Eva during his incessant tantrums and irrational fears. Infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering, afflicted with a bad heart and a sick psyche, Jan lives for a chance to resume his career. It never comes.

Monstrous Metamorphosis. In Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard saw the end of the world as a vast traffic jam. Bergman's concept is less visual--and more chilling. His people never see history; like radiation, it destroys them without touching them. Jan and Eva become aliens in their own marriage. They rage against their cage and at each other. As Samuel Beckett puts it, "The mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm. The whiskey bears a grudge against the decanter." Half from fear, half from the desire to have the child Jan cannot give her, Eva sleeps with a friend (Gunnar Bjoernstrand) who has become a partisan leader. Jan discovers the couple and becomes a gross caricature of himself. Formerly, he could not even kill a chicken; now he contrives to empty a revolver into the partisan; soon he becomes a thief who has no compunction about shooting a youthful soldier for his boots. The monstrous metamorphosis is Bergman's allusion to the shrunken intellectuals of World War II who could attend gas chambers in the daytime and listen to Wagner at night.

At the end, with money he has stolen, Jan buys passage on a vessel piloted by a fisherman friend. But if the fisherman is Peter, there is no Christ. --In a scene that seems less photographed than etched, the boat drifts through clutches of floating corpses; the sky and ocean are pitiless, and death is the only redemption.

Once, wailing at the war and at their situation, Eva feels as if she is part of someone else's dream. "What happens," she asks, "when that person wakes up and is ashamed?" That "person" may seem, superficially, to be God. But Bergman assigns the responsibility to a far more accessible source. What is the future, he asks, but a dream of the present? If that future is a nightmare of disaster and war, the shame and the blame cannot be laid at the gates of heaven, but at the feet of Man.

Molten Eroticism. For the last several years, it has been unfair to judge Bergman on an individual film. To state that The Shame is not quite up to The Seventh Seal is like saying that Blake's The Mental Traveller is not equivalent to Songs of Experience. What matters is the body of his work--comprising 29 films--which now amounts to a great literature of heroic despair.

Nor is it legitimate to speak of Bergman's players merely as actors. People like Von Sydow and Bjoernstrand have been with him for over a decade. What the Moscow Art Theater was to Stanislavsky, these performers are to Bergman--ensemble members who function like fingers on a hand. Liv Ullman, newest member of the troupe, is, astonishingly, the best, portraying a whole range of feminine response, from molten eroticism to glacial hate. At the end of his life, Freud wrote: "The great question, which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" Ullman supplies no answer, but no other actress could have rephrased the question so well.

Scandinavian tourists troop off the ferry with light portable ladders to prop against the high stone wall. Sheep Island is a long way from Stockholm, the wind is bitter, and the wall is high. But to them the object is worth the search--a glimpse of Bergman and what Swedes euphemize as his latest "little home companion." If they are lucky, they can see a brilliant glint of strawberry blonde hair and the planed face with its saddle of freckles and wistful smile.

For Bergman, 50, such liaisons are nothing new; he has been married four times, and his name is a favorite with Scandinavian rumormongers. But for Liv Ullman, 29, the aspect of scandal is unfamiliar. Born in Tokyo of Norwegian parents, she later went to Canada, where her aircraft-engineer father was fatally injured in a landing-field accident. Resettled in Norway, she developed a single obsession: to be an actress. She dropped out of high school, convinced that she could meet the lofty standards of Oslo's National Theater School. When they refused her, she stubbornly set off for London for eight months of intense acting lessons. They were enough to give her the sheen and technique she lacked.

Sealed Inside. Back in Norway, Ullman joined a provincial troupe, not long afterward became a member of the prestigious National Theater of Norway and married an Oslo psychiatrist, Hans Stang. By the time she was 26, she was a major stage actress in her own country, with four films to her credit. But her fame remained sealed inside Norway until Bergman, struck by the resemblance between Ullman and his longtime star, Bibi Andersson, (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries) offered her a role in his study of personality transference, Persona. Radiant over her success as an actress and her selection by Bergman, she told the Stockholm press: "I am a very happy girl. I had two great wishes in my life, and they both came true. There is nothing left to want."

Shortly after the filming of Persona, the rumors began. She and Bergman gave out the news that they enjoyed an "extraordinarily fine relationship." Late this year, the Stangs divorced, and Ullman--and her daughter Linn--moved into the $100,000 house Bergman recently built on Sheep Island, scene of The Shame. On occasion, they can also be spied upon in their town house in Stockholm's expensive residential suburb, Deer Garden. Guarding his privacy with zeal, Bergman has only once publicly ventured an opinion about the woman who has played a major role in his last three films--and in his life. "As in photography, Liv is a complete commentary unto herself," he maintains. "Besides I am in love with her--creatively and personally."

Silly Woman. He is not alone. "She's one of the most talented actresses around," says Bjoernstrand. "A little like Ingmar--full of health, vitality, humor." To Von Sydow, Ullman has "a rare ability to express emotions in front of a camera in a very pure way, very directly. It is something I have rarely seen." To the National Society of Film Critics in the U.S., she was a brilliant actress in the year's best film, Persona; to international audiences, she is the latest Scandinavian beauty who--like Garbo or Ingrid Bergman or Ingrid Thulin--manages to convey a mind beneath the skin.

Next year, Ullman will star in a non-Bergman film, Jan Troell's two-part The Immigrants and The Emigrants, to be filmed in Sweden, Canada and the U.S. But, though there have been other offers from both European and American film makers, Ullman shows no inclination to be far from her companion. During the making of The Shame, he directed her to move closer to a flaming house. "Burning things were flying over my head," she recalls. "I tried to get a little out of the way from the house. Bergman shouted, 'Don't be so scared, silly woman!' and I hated him for days." You were caught, she was asked, between the fire on one side and Bergman on the other? "Yes," she replied. "And of course I chose Bergman."

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