Shame (1968) - film review

Jan and Eva are two former concert musicians who have retired to a sparsely populated island where they live a peaceful, uneventful life working on a remote farm.  Their isolation from the outside world keeps them in ignorance of an impending war – which suddenly arrives on their door step, instantly upending their lives.  As the warring factions arrive on the island, bringing destruction and death in their wake, Jan and Eva are caught in the crossfire, taunted by one side, then the other.  Their struggle to survive proves to be an ordeal that will change them forever...

Shame is possibly the closest that director Ingmar Bergman came to making a political film, although its ambiguity provides ample scope for interpretation and speculation as to what his intention was in making this film.  It’s probable the film was inspired by the seemingly interminable war in Vietnam, the most destructive conflict since the Second World War, noteworthy for its almost unimaginable civilian death toll.

It’s fair to regard Shame as an anti-war film, but with it’s graphic depiction of the consequences of war it could hardly be regarded in any other light.  The film is far less concerned with the material damage that war creates than with the devastating psychological impact on those who find themselves caught up in it.  Along with The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Winter Light (1962), Shame is a stark existentialist masterpiece which probes the very depths of the human psyche, a work that no serious film enthusiast can afford to miss.

Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, two of Bergman’s preferred actors and arguably the best in his small repertory, play a married couple whose painful experiences of war provide the focus for the film.  At the start of the film, these characters are pretty well oblivious to threat that is lurking over the horizon and naively believe that they can go on living in their parochial retreat forever.  When this illusion is shattered, it happens spectacularly and they are suddenly catapulted into the midst of a trauma that soon becomes a living Hell.  It is then that the transformation begins.  It’s hard to be indifferent to war when people start shooting at you.

Von Sydow’s character, Jan, is the one that undergoes the greatest change.  At the outset of the conflict, he is a snivelling coward who, like a small child, cannot accept what is happening.  Ullmann’s character, Eva, is the stronger of the two at this stage, and shows far greater resilience in the face of the growing threat.  It’s interesting that in most of Bergman’s films, it is the women characters who are the strongest, whereas men are often portrayed as weak, vacillating and ineffective – a consequence perhaps of the director’s experiences as a child.

As things progress, as senseless destruction, degradation and brutality are hammered into their minds and bodies, Jan and Eva develop further.  They become harder, more cynical, and the inevitable happens: they begin to hate one another.  The change is most noticeable in Jan who, the weaker and more pliant of the two characters, is morphed from a spineless self-interested pacifist into an unfeeling, unsympathetic brute who is capable of cold-blooded murder.  It is a gradual process of dehumanisation which stems from the most primitive of human needs – the need to survive and protect that which is most precious.

Ironically, it is Jan’s love for Eva that transforms him into the pitiful creature that she can only hate, failing to see the transformation in her own character.  Although things seem to end well, with a reconciliation of sorts, it is clear that something has been taken away.  The experience of war has not only destroyed their material world, it has irrevocably scarred their feelings for one another.  For them, the war has been like a torchlight that has revealed something of themselves they would rather have kept locked away, and the shame of that will be bitterest legacy of the war.  For them, as for so many others, the war will never be over.

© James Travers 2007

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After the credits, which are accompanied by confused voices and sounds of warfare, the movie begins as a theatrical piece, and even the ringing of the alarm clock seems to announce the start of a performance. Twilight, a bedroom, a woman comes and lifts the window curtain.  A day like any other day, but soon it will be transformed into the first day of war for the couple who up to then have been oblivious to the impending conflict. The bombing that follows projects them into the inescapable reality of the situation.  In spite of the scenes with more people, the action is centred on the couple (played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman), in which it is the male who suffers the most despicable metamorphosis.   War, the film seems to say, converts human beings into beasts.   Perhaps never in the history of cinema have extreme closes-up of a couple embracing one other suggested so much emotional distance.   There is no God in this Bergman picture, and the sky only indicates the passage of time or provides the scenery for attacking war planes. The first words of the male protagonist refer to a dream in which the couple return to play, as musicians, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4.  The last words in the film are pronounced by the female protagonist, also telling a dream, embracing her husband in a drifting boat.  In this latter dream, someone tells her something she cannot now remember.   It is a film about two musicians in which the only music that is heard comes from a music box.  It is a film about a war in which the soldiers of the two factions in the struggle are seen to be the same.  A film about people who try to survive at any price.  The desolate landscape, the burned houses, the scattered piles of cadavers, the bleak tone of the photography show the misery that run through the characters’ feelings. Ingmar Bergman creates a portrait of society in war, through the behaviour of a couple.
Adam Gai (Israel) 

Contrary to much of what I read about this film, I see Shame as an allegory in which Bergman explores neutrality as a morally unacceptable stance when facing human conflicts of universal proportions; in some way probably it’s signaling the Swedish position during WW2 in the light of history.
Eduardo Olascuaga (Montevideo) 

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