Shame

Rating:
Summary: Bergman's War Movie; And One Of His Very Best
Review: One doesn't think of Ingmar Bergman as a director of action or thriller (genre) movies. But he directs the war sequences in "Shame" with stunning confidence. It seems he could have made many more big (even epic) movies if he had been so inclined. This film features Bergman veterans Von Sydow and Ullmann as ordinary people who are turned into refugees by a ferocious war in which they get caught. They lose everything, are harassed, beaten and exploited. Eventually the neurotic Von Sydow proves he will do anything to survive. Simone Weil once wrote "the great mystery of life is not suffering, but affliction." That is: suffering brings out the best in some people, others it turns into beasts. This movie asks that most painful question: what would you do in the same situation? The film presents a harrowing landscape of hell on earth that ends in a climax that will inevitably remind you of "Titanic", although Bergman did it first. It's more immediately accessible than many of Bergman's other movies because the anguish here takes external form, not just emotionally interior terror. A neglected masterpiece that should be seen at least as often as his other great works.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Interpersonal Conflict...
Review: Shame (Skammen) is a drama set in a pre-war and war where the film depicts the interpersonal relationship between Eva (Liv Ullman) and Jan (Max von Sydow) and how the present circumstances affect the couple. Jan is a neurotic dreamer who attempts to avoid anything that causes him any level of discomfort. His wife, Eva, is a hopeful realist with dreams about a better future where they both can be happy. Eva is the anchor that secures Jan in their mundane existence on a small farm on a remote island as they have withdrawn from public life. Jan is the reason why they no longer live in an urban area because he does everything within his powers to stay away from people and civilization. The solitude is wearing on Eva, which emerges every now and then in the shape of irritation. However, Eva expresses her deep love for Jan by hiding her irritation and instead focuses on the happy moments that they have. Eva and Jan are aware of the imminent threat of war as their neighbors inform them occasionally, but when the war breaks out they are not prepared for its brutality as it tears them apart. They both realize that they distance themselves from each other as their characters slowly change. Bergman personifies the rift that develops between couples as they emotionally part during a phase when change comes from dramatic situations. The subtlety in which the confrontation between Eva and Jan is illustrated in is an example of Bergman's refined skills as a storyteller as he places them in a war where the couple does not wage war against each other. Shame offers a painfully cinematic experience, however, this is Bergman's intentions as he brings another brilliant event to the audience.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning evocation of love and war
Review: Sweden never had a civil war, but Ingmar Bergman imagined it in this brilliant film. Like Stephen Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan", "Shame" brings home the horror of wholesale butchery without a drop of sentimentality. Unlike that movie, though, "Shame" comes nowhere near hero-worship. In fact, I think it's actually the more masterful of the two films, for it evokes war's brutality on a much smaller scale and yet with greater subtlety and closer attention to the impact of destruction on individuals.

Filmed in 1968, at the height of the Cold War, "Shame" portrays the ordeal of a young couple named Jan and Eva Rosenberg (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann), who own a small farm on a remote island in Sweden and who struggle to survive as the conflict that ravages the mainland spills over and starts to engulfs them. Jan and Eva are thoroughly apolitical and want nothing to do with the war. While obviously evoking the competing totalitarian ideologies of the Cold War (communism & capitalism), Bergman's genius is that he never actually identifies what these two competing ideologies are. By doing so, he creates a film that has no explicit political message unless it be that war is hell. The film forces us to step outside our own narrow political prejudices and look directly at the effects of war on humanity, irrespective of politics. For Bergman, belief systems are totally irrelevant. By not even telling us what they are here in the first place, he focuses exclusively on the human tragedy involved.

Moreover, by setting this conflict in Sweden, an affluent Western country that has never been involved in a major modern war, Bergman makes us consider what war must feel like when it shows up in one of "our" societies. This is no a faraway place, and it has not been ravaged by ancient feuds and incessant hatreds down through history. It is as close to "us" here in the West as could be. Furthermore, by setting "Shame" in a country as pristine and "virgin" as Sweden, Bergman brings home to us with crushing force what most Europeans and Americans are now unable to fathom in hindsight due to so many decades of adjustment to it -- the savage, soul-splitting nightmare that devoured Europe in the 20th century and tore civilization apart at its very seams.

The visual impact of this film is also stunning. For while Scandinavian filmmakers had already filmed such incredible movies in color as "Elvira Madigan" (1967), Bergman chose to film this one in black and white. The effect of the black-and-white still-shots of Sydow and Ullmann's faces is remarkable (and what a face Sydow has!). The script and plot is phenomenal, alternating masterfully between understated and yet overpowering scenes of love and war.

Brilliant movie. Five stars.

Rating:
Summary: One of the five gems of Bergman
Review: This film is simply extraordinary. The performances given por Von Sydow and (one of my female icons) Liv Ullman, are superb.
It's just the genius of Bergman what it makes the great difference. The story increases gradually in organic intensity. The passions and the hopeless get together and produce an efervescence state very close to the paranoid.
¡A real landmark in the story of the cinema!.