A rhythm had developed with Audient Classics, where just before the new month would begin, I would develop a seemingly spontaneous but then unshakeable hunger to watch one of the movies I'd identified for this series. I'd usually follow through with no problem in the first two weeks of the new month.
That didn't happen in September, and in fact, I had to go fishing around for a bit before I landed on my choice.
The Virgin Spring is the lowest ranked movie on my Flickchart that I've watched for this series, coming in at "only" 735 out of 6354, or 88%. There are plenty of contenders ranked higher who will miss out on the series, since I have only three installments remaining.
But I landed on Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film after a couple of other choices weren't as easy to come by on my existing streaming services as I'd hoped, and this one clearly was. In fact, not long after I jumped into my Kanopy watchlist, there it appeared -- all the sweeter for only being 90 minutes, which is especially useful for me still being a bit sick after eight days of nursing a persistent cold.
The choice was also fortuitous because it has just become spring in the southern hemisphere. As I've mentioned many times before, the seasons change on the first of the month in Australia, and September 1st marked the arrival of spring after a fairly moderate winter.
Of course, it took my second viewing of The Virgin Spring to be reminded that it's not the season this title is evoking, but rather, the water source. Since I'd forgotten the exact nature of the final scene of this movie, that moment in the story produced a little gasp from me when it arrived.
As I did the first time, I considered the fact that this movie provided the template for The Last House on the Left and its various reboots, one of which, Chaos, currently holds the second lowest spot on my Flickchart. In truth, though, I've only seen the original and Chaos, and I've now seen this twice since I've seen either of them, so this movie is more of a current frame of reference for me than either of those.
The almost disarming simplicity of this story made it a good choice for a sick night. Bergman's films tend to be on a continuum from very challenging to not very challenging, and if something like Persona is on one extreme end of that spectrum, The Virgin Spring might be on the other.
I don't really consider it a spoiler to talk about a film that is 63 years old, but just in case: SPOILER ALERT.
The plot is as simple as it can be. In medieval Sweden, virginal girl and the only child of her parents goes on a day's journey to take candles to a church. Trusting by nature -- fatally so -- she shares her lunch with a trio of herdsmen, two men and a child, who proceed to rape and murder her. They steal her fancy garments in the hopes of selling them, and try to do so at the place they are staying for the night. That happens to be the home of the girl who is now missing, and her mother recognizes her daughter's clothes when the lead herdsman proffers them to her. She tells her husband, who awakens the men from their slumber to murder them.
It's the final scene I alluded to earlier that I found particularly interesting in the way I frequently find religious miracles captured on him (in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet among others) compelling. When the family and its companions track down the girl's body (with the help of their servant, who considers herself to blame for the daughter's death due to her feelings of jealousy), a mysterious spring of water appears from behind where her head is lying in the grass. This is, effectively, God's answer to the vows of the father, who says he doesn't understand God's ways but also feels guilt over his own murderous vengeance, declaring he will erect a church in this very spot.
Characters struggle with their faith repeatedly in the films of Ingmar Bergman, and this one in particular considers the eternal question posed by such people: "Why do good things happen to bad people?" The daughter Karin, played by Birgitta Pettersson, is the epitome of the innocent, the one who doesn't see the danger in other people and therefore succumbs to it.
It was interesting to me to see how swiftly Bergman orchestrates the deaths of the characters who die, as though he acknowledges that these are necessary waystations in the thematic journey of the narrative, but he does not relish them in any sense. Karin's rape is more implied than shown, although there's some depiction of her desperate struggle. When she is killed, it is from only a single blow with a stick. While most movie characters survive injuries that should kill them, she is the opposite, expiring symbolically as much as she expires physically.
The same restraint is shown when her father (played by Bergman regular Max Von Sydow) kills the men. Their struggles are a bit more elongated, but in each instance the knife he drives into their bodies does not seem the kind of wound that would kill them instantly. The child suffers a similar death to the man's own daughter, from a head injury suffered by being thrown by Von Sydow's character into a shelving unit. Bergman shows no instinct to luxuriate in any of this physical violence. It's the violence of human nature that is of greater interest.
Bergman's regular DP Sven Nykvist renders the proceedings simultaneously plain and suffused with a sort of dark magic. The incredible look of this film makes it clear why Bergman wanted to continue working in black and white as long as he could. In fact, every Bergman movie I've seen in color, even the ones I've loved, has made me long for the non-color alternative that so expertly underscores his themes.
Okay on to October, when I have to decide if there's a horror movie that qualifies for this series.
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