Gertrud (1964) - film review

Gertrud Kanning, a retired opera singer living in Stockholm, is unhappy in her married life.  She tells her husband Gustav, a lawyer with a promising political career ahead of him, that she intends to leave him as she no longer loves him.  Gertrud is having an affair with a talented young musician, Erland Jansson, and she plans to begin a new life with him.  Coincidentally, an old flame of Gertrud’s suddenly re-enters her life.  During a party held in his honour, the celebrated poet Gabriel Lidman attempts to revive Gertrud’s erstwhile passion for him, unsuccessfully.  Gertrud’s dreams of a new romance are then shattered when she learns that Erland is seeing another woman and has no intention of committing himself to her.  On the spur of the moment, she leaves Gustav and heads for Paris, to join her friend Axel Nygen, a professor of psychology.  Will Gertrud at last find the happiness she is looking for, or is her search for true love destined to end in failure...?

Gertrud was the last film to be directed by the legendary Danish auteur filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer and is arguably his most beguiling and most perfectly composed work.  Adapted from a 1920s stage play by Hjalmar Söderberg, the film explores the notion of free will and whether it is ever possible for a human being to experience true love, untainted by baser motives and worldly compromises.  Whilst the film is highly regarded today, and is considered by many to be Dreyer’s finest achievement, it was generally ill-received when it was first released in 1964, with many critics writing off its austere stylisation as laboured theatricality.

One of the most striking things about Dreyer’s work is the diversity of subjects that he covers in the fourteen films he made.  These range from the martyrdom of Joan of Arc in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) to religious conflict in a small Danish village in Ordet (1955), via an inspired adaptation of Le Fanu’s vampire story Carmilla, Vampyr (1932).  Yet there is also a remarkable coherence in Dreyer’s oeuvre, with recurring stylistic and thematic motifs that make a very distinctive hallmark.

One theme that runs through most, if not all, of Dreyer’s films is the suffering of women, often as a consequence of male cruelty or neglect.  Gertrud both epitomises and transcends the Dreyer heroine - she is a victim, but she is a victim of her own choice.  The tragedy that she experiences is one that is entirely of her own making, and one that she would doubtless repeat if she were able to live her life again.  For her, love is the only thing that matters in life.  If she settles for a mere imitation of love, then she will have betrayed her own beliefs.  The parallels between the Maid of Orleans and Gertrud are not too difficult to discern.  Just as Joan surrenders her life for her religious beliefs, Gertrud does pretty much the same for the great motivating force in her life, love.

Another linking theme in Dreyer’s films is the auteur’s striving for authenticity, which goes beyond mere naturalism.  In his early silent films, Dreyer was one of the first filmmakers to appreciate the power of the close-up, how this could be used to allow an actor to convey his character’s inner feelings with the minimum of external gestures.  Even in his last film, Dreyer (now aged 75) is still experimenting, still looking for ways to negate artifice from an actor’s performance and the director’s mise-en-scène, to leave only the truth.  Here, he achieves his goal by embedding his actors in a sea of unreal stillness.  Long takes abolish the distraction of cuts and emphasise the lack of movement in the frame.  Dreyer does this because he wants every gesture made by an actor to have a significance, allowing the audience to see into his character’s interior world. 

Although the characters in this film inhabit the same physical space, emotionally they appear to be worlds apart.  In virtually all of her dialogue exchanges, Gertrud is looking away from her interlocutor, unwilling or unable to establish any kind of human bond with another character. Dreyer intentionally inhibited his actors from looking at one another to emphasise this sense of separation and also to prevent them from sparking off one another.  The shot composition and restrained camerawork achieve a similar result.   Gertrud’s ultimate fate becomes immediately evident when we see her framed in her treasured rococo mirror - she appears trapped, alone, in her own perfect universe.  Like Joan in the courtroom that will decide her fate, Gertrud remains true to her beliefs, holding herself back for the one true love that will make her a complete woman.  What immediately strikes us as Greek tragedy can be seen as something more positive - the glorious triumph of the individual who has remained true to his ideals - just like Dreyer himself.  How appropriate that Dreyer’s last film can be read as a celebration of the auteur.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?