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: 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!.
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