Through a Glass Darkly

At the end of Through a Glass Derkly, the hero, who has just watched his daughter succumb to inherited insanity, announces that God is love. Since the young woman has lost her grip on reality in the presence of three who love her deeply, and has been unable to draw either comfort or support from their love, the sentiment seems somewhat irrelevant, but it is an appropriate conclusion to a film laden with unconvincing philosophies and illogical sequences.

Introducing insanity into the performing arts is terribly hazardous, for derangement can be a deus exmachine that patches over every discontinuity and weakness in the plot. Bergman has compounded the risks by driving the subject from relative sanity to madness in less than a day, by using a peculiarly inhuman sort of disorder (the girl expects God to come through a wall), and by eschewing both the flashbacks and the reminiscences that might give perspective upon the way those around her react to her disintegration.

And so, in a film whose cast has but four members, the heroine becomes a complete cipher whose behavior serves only to disorganize the film--the lone unity is her growing psychosis. The behavior of her father, brother, and husband, who complete the cast, might have been the basis for a coherent film, but they have been given weaknesses of their own that strip them of individuality and make them types: one bumbling adolescent, one frustrated artist, one ineffectual husband.

A disquiet that has nagged me through the last halfdozen of Bergman's films that I have seen becomes gratingly obvious in this one: his dialogue consists of monotonously pompous sermons and gratuitously unpleasant analyses of the characters within the film. Real people seldom talk to one another this way, principally because they don't have to gloss the weaknesses of a Bergman script with explications of its premises. This failing reaches an embarrassing crescendo in an unattractive scene with the girl's father and her husband tearing each other apart in order to say things Bergman couldn't say for himself.

It is discouraging to watch sensitive direction and powerful photography founder upon a wretched script. The carefully focused composition and precise lighting give enormous force to a few scenes, particularly one in an open boat and another inside the wreck of an old schooner. And Harriet Andersen's acting is consistently stunning.

Bergman has come a long way from Torment, his first film, in which he handled an adolescent's agony with human feeling, but occasional cliches. Unfortunately, he has also come far from the skill and insight of Wild Strawberries. The bizarre has become the sententious and powerful has become the senseless. I am told that he has called Through a Glass Darkly his "Opus One", and relegated his earlier efforts to the status of preludes. It's too bad.