Jue's Blog

To inaugurate the re-birth of this blog, I’ll go back to my favorite topic — vicariously experiencing unfathomable truth and beauty. You know, the really unfathomable kind. It grabs me sometimes as my mind wanders furiously through a bus ride, only later to have a splitting headache and not remember what caused it. Or when I just finish my homework and the rest of the world is getting up from a sound night’s sleep, but I am happy because one of the problems made me understand the universe.

It happens too when I watch movies. I saw Through a Glass Darkly a few days ago, and sat so silently there in front of the screen that I didn’t notice that we — the cynical, discriminating bunch that my friends and I are — were not making our usual share of snide observations. This doesn’t happen often, and even run-of-the-mill serious dramas rarely pre-empt our biting wit and feigned general distaste for seriousness and drama.

But this movie teetered perfectly between baffling and poetic. Not everything fit together, but the experience of watching it was so visually and sensually arresting that my mind just didn’t pause long enough to let criticism and doubt set in. Good thing, too, because the movie already had enough doubt to go around, and the recurring contemplation of faith and love in the script, of faith being love, set the tone for some serious metaphysical examination.

I especially loved the movie’s pervasive allusions to chamber music. There was a veritable quartet of characters, and their stories played out like counterpoint over the span of 24 hours on a remote Swedish island. Besides the use of Bach’s D Minor Cello Sonata at the beginning and middle of the film, the intense, intimate mood was reinforced by frequent shots of windows or doorways at the back of dark, hollow rooms. The chiaroscuro of each shot, rich like velvet, enacted a dreamlike, allegorical dimension to everything that unfolded on screen. A sensation of isolation and twilight was echoed on a literal level — by the setting at the fringe of civilization and the Arctic circle — and on an emotional, spiritual one.

The details of the plot aren’t so important. You could figure them out by reading a synopsis or, better, by watching the movie yourself. It was the ending, or the way in which the themes were tied together in the end, that still baffles and provokes me. It was an attempt at closure, to recover belief in God, or in love perhaps, but after all that had taken place between the characters, it is hard to imagine what form that affirmation might take. Is Bergman telling us that his characters — and by not-so-subtle extension, himself — had actually found some purpose to their existence, or is their story more about salvation from nihilist despair and the recovery of a belief in such a purpose? Did the characters even believe in God? In love? I’m not convinced that they did.

Wikipedia plot synopsis of Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel)
Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite in D Minor