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 Björnstrand) 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.