Any passing visitor who’s toiled amongst the weeds of Ingmar Bergman’s vast garden of emotional entanglements will surely recognize the same familiar seeds of chaos, conflict, and spiritual carnage sown between the damned pistel and stamen of whichever variety of lovers feature into a particular film – but in Shame (1968), his scabbed and battered masterwork of wartime wreckage, the Swedish auteur lays fire to the roses. Incendiary combat between dueling psyches in intimate locations fuels much of his filmography – the mother-daughter melee of Autumn Sonata and frosty schoolhouse rejection in Winter Light immediately jump to mind – but Shame ignites a maximalist fuse within its scope that quite literally drops a bomb on the long-suffering couple at the broken heart of its story. By contrasting the domestic drama of Eva and Jan Rosenberg’s (Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow) decomposing marriage against a backdrop of military destruction and societal decay, Bergman turns the canvas of the soul inside out and externalizes the conflict of a toxic relationship into the very warzone that is exacerbating its decline.
From the caustic first sounds of gunfire and ear-splittingly pitched drones that overwhelm the opening credits from some unseen calamity, Bergman situates the viewer in an aural atmosphere of violence and disorder; the jarring mash-up of aggressive noise aggravates the ear and establishes an uncomfortable, angry imbalance before an image even hits the screen. Once he weaves the muffled static of warped radio broadcasts into the mix, the combative soundscape makes way for a communication breakdown amidst the cries of war. By summoning together sounds of wartime fury and the circuitous signals that people try and fail to impress upon one another, Bergman inextricably binds the film’s two driving forces of consequence on the soul: the pandemonium of war and the purgatory of two people refusing to acknowledge the rupture in their relationship.
A ringing alarm clock shocks us from the credits to the picture, in the dim bedroom of our central couple. Hardly a scene of domestic bliss, Eva and Jan awake in separate beds, begin their morning routines without speaking a word, and quickly splinter off to separate rooms. The first time one acknowledges the other, Eva shoots him a quick look of equal parts annoyance and indifference as he sits on the edge of his bed rubbing his pained jaw. Later, at breakfast, Jan bemoans the wisdom tooth breaking through the back of his gums and sticks Eva’s finger into his mouth so she can feel the enormity of its injury. Of course, despite his best efforts, forcing our partners to physically feel our own pain is a fool’s errand; the only constructive option is to communicate and, in turn, receive compassion but Bergman signals through his desperate gesture that talking through an issue has long been off the table. When they do speak, they oscillate between cutesy declarations of affection and passive aggressive jabs about banal behaviors. Their beat-up car boasts scratchy scars across its side, a reflection of the ways in which they’ve picked at each other throughout their seven-year marriage yet still manage to rattle forward. When Jan leaves Eva inside of it so he can run back into the house, she breathes a sigh of relief, alone at last.
While highly perceptive to the little things in the relationship that drive each other crazy, they are oblivious (or in denial) to the civil war breaking out across Sweden that has their neighbors scrambling for safety. This is partly due to none of their appliances working – including their radio – but also to their negligence in recognizing the current state of their surroundings. As they head for the ferry – like many of Bergman’s films Shame takes place on his beloved Fårö Island, although here that isolation underlines their self-selected naivety – a row of tanks pass by their home, a surefire warning sign for any sensible person but these two take it with a bit of a shrug. On the mainland, they sell lingonberries while battalions blanket the street and take their earnings to a local bar to buy themselves some wine instead of procuring safe passage from the conflict; they puzzle over the bar being empty instead of taking it as a warning sign. Their interests lie more in slipping from reality with a chilled ’59 white wine rather than address the impending damage from a cause already lost – both the war and their relationship. They reminisce about their times together playing in the philharmonic – the good times, when they fell in love – instead of confronting the ways in which the old order has decayed and proven unsustainable. Like many unhappy couples, Eva suggests they have a child in order to solve their problems. Politically, they are equally as untethered to the reality of their situation.
Corresponding with a disturbing, and ironic, amount of symbiosis, Eva and Jan’s last attempt at rekindling connection through sex is met with a pummeling torrent of gunfire in their own backyard – the war finally arriving ashore. Planes overhead rattle the sky and rain bombs upon the island. Panicked, the Rosenbergs attempt to pack up and leave their home but still fail to address the horror surrounding them as a life-threatening force. As they flee, they are met with scenes of apocalyptic ruin consuming their former homeland – dead children, buildings turned to rubble, raging rings of fire – and as they each fail to provide support for one another while scrambling for survival, Jan’s pacifism clashes against Eva’s pragmatism. Throughout their time in this warzone – including, and especially, in its aftermath – they make decisions that are at once brutal and honest in their capacities for violence and betrayal. While Jan claims too weak to wring the necks of their chickens for food or Eva too devoted to abandon her husband for another man, this prolonged confrontation with death forces them to finally face their inner demons and desires in the wild, away from the shelter of their crumbling relationship which has finally caved in.
As Shame often flies under the radar in the casual Bergman canon, I’m choosing to leave it there as an invitation to buckle up for the rest of the film’s havoc and despair if you haven’t yet seen it – which, luckily, can easily be streamed on FilmStruck. While Bergman made Shame during the Vietnam War, and was not shy about expressing his disapproval of the U.S.’s prolonged involvement, he rejected the notion that the film was some sort of direct comment on that specific conflict. I do think his commentary on war as a brutal state of inhumanity and ruin goes beyond the links to the couple of this story, and it’s certainly worth evaluating his moral exploration divorced of notions regarding couples past their prime. But to consider the two recollections of dreams that bookend the film – one from Jan, one from Eva – solidifies the spiritual and independent growth the Rosenbergs’ experience throughout the hellish conflict. In the first scene, Jan tells Eva how he dreamed about their time together in the philharmonic and how he pines to return to that promising time of love in bloom. At the film’s conclusion, in a setting that could be described as hopeless and horrific but also still, Eva shares a dream from which she’s just awoken. In it, she holds a daughter and walks peacefully down a city street with a verdant park alongside her until planes appear from nowhere and rain down fire upon the flowers. Peering at the destruction of something that was once so picturesque but now had reached its violent end, she doesn’t perceive the terminus as tragic. At peace, she describes it as beautiful.