May the Faro be with you

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2019)

The Baltic Sea, should you find yourself there, and you're the romantic type, searching for a philosopher by rowboat, you know about the two islands off the southeastern coast of Sweden. You're looking for Faro, the smaller rock, further north from Gotland, where filmmaker Ingmar Bergman called home, away from well-meaning but bothersome cineastes who had so many questions about the creative force inside him, until he passed away in 2007 at the the age of 89. Filmmaker Rian Johnson outs Ingmar as a secret Skywalker, Luke's spiritual brother. In "The Last Jedi", Episode VII in the "Star Wars" saga, Luke Skywalker(Mark Hamill), a Jedi who lost that fightin' feeling, can't understand how this unannounced visitor, Rey(Daisy Ridley), a mere girl, was able to locate the tiny island on the most obscure planet in the galaxy. Towards the end of J.J. Abrams' "The Force Awakens", BB8, an astromech droid, supplies the last piece that completes the map detailing Master Luke's supposed whereabouts, which R2D2 kept stored in low-power mode. The two hermits, one, a fictional character, a Jedi Knight, who turned his back on "The Force", a religion that, according to its last living practitioner, does as much bad as it does good; and the other, a legendary filmmaker of Swedish origin, who directed, for starters, "Winter Light", the 1963 film about a pastor losing his religion and his parishioner to suicide, is linked together by Max von Sydow. Sydow plays both Jonas Persson, the morose and fatalistic Lutheran, and Lor San Tekka, a retired adventurer but active Resistance collaborator from Jakku, the same desert planet where Rey, an orphaned junk collector, hails from. The presence of the medieval knight from Bergman's masterpiece "The Seventh Seal" makes plausible the theory that Faro serves as the inspiration for the floating rock where Luke Skywalker inhabits. "Bergman's Island", Faro's unofficial moniker, had loyal residents who protected their famous neighbor from reporters and tourists, which became increasingly harder after the advent of Google Maps during Bergman's final years, but like Rey, not coincidentally, the film world sent its own emissary, Marie Nyrerod, a girl, to coax the old master back into the spotlight. Luke, inevitably, would unretire, but in Bergman's case, "Saraband", released in 2003, would prove to be his final film, but Nyrerod returned back to civilization with "Bergman's Island", the last time the film universe would hear from its beloved hero, whose camera was his lightsaber.
"I have a high state of disaster preparedness," Bergman describes to Nyrerod. It's how he fights The Demon of Disaster, a demon that is pertinent to "The Last Jedi". It comes from a list of personal demons that Bergman wrote down on folded paper, like a found sacred text, which he brings to the interview. Bergman adds: "This means that you imagine everything you do in a day, everything you plan from that day onwards, will go terribly wrong." Luke Skywalker knew that awry feeling on a daily basis while teaching Ben(Adam Driver), the son of Han Solo(Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia(Carrie Fisher), the ways of the Jedi at his training temple. He forgot the religion's most basic tenet: The Force will always be; it does not die with the Jedi. What goes unsaid from the Jedi in exile is that the legend who was Luke Skywalker, mistakenly believed that he could handle the dark forces welling up in Ben Solo. "It was too late," Rey hears this ascetic man explain about the transformation that Snoke(Andy Serkis) played a part in engineering. Luke had no cure for "the darkness rising in him", the future leader of the First Order. On a rainy night, while Leia's son slept, Luke confirmed for the final time what he already knew must be done, which was to kill the dark side that resided in the boy with a quick stroke from the lightsaber. Skywalker knew it would end in disaster.
In the Nyrerod documentary, the longer Bergman speaks, the more he sounds like a Jedi master. Two demons: Fear and Rage, duel and cancel each other out, a perpetual draw that leaves a wizened Bergman at repose despite owning up to "a dreadful temper" inherited from his parents, because at the same time, he also admits to being "scared of everything" and "afraid of several kinds of people," himself included. In a nutshell, that is The Force. The Faro townsfolk respect Bergman's need for seclusion, just like the alien caretakers of Ahch-To, indigenous planetary creatures who coexists peacefully alongside Luke, not Master Luke, the honorific name C3PO(Anthony Daniels) gave the boy since their halcyon days on Tatooine. On this lonely island, the student becomes the teacher, like Yoda before him, "young Skywalker" gives Rey a crash course on becoming a Jedi. Sitting atop a flat rock, the young woman-in-training senses "powerful light, powerful darkness," the same sort of balance that Bergman touches on; fear and rage, the two-headed demon all Jedi Knights try to nullify, but some, inevitably, lose, in a moment of weakness, hubris, and the craven thirst for power, which polarizes such equanimity. With Luke's encouragement, Rey meditates; her mind's eye explores the Jedi religion through a geographical survey of the island, exploring its themes of good and evil in its topography, with the latter being represented by a round cave opening near the ocean. "You went straight to the dark!" Luke, in anguish, cries out, reminding him anew as to why the Jedi order must end. The dark side is seductive and omnipotent, a negative energy source that eats away at the soul, which no novitiate should have to deal with alone. Rey answers: "But I didn't see you. Nothing from you," and like Jonas Persson(Max von Sydow) in "Winter Light", she had no choice but to face the prospect of dying without the sanctification that a Jedi Knight or a pastor offers as a provision against evil.
It shows, the disappearance of Pastor Tomas Ericsson's faith. People can tell. That's why they stay away in droves. His sermons are delivered like rote memorizations in a saturnine voice that communicates the agony of existence, not hope. Only a desperate lot takes solace in a black Eucharist, among them Karin Persson(Gunnel Lindblom), Jonas' wife. He asks the pastor(Gunnar Bjornstrand) to counsel her distressed husband, who fears China, a country with the A-bomb. To Jonas, it's the Death Star. Pastor Tomas shares with Luke Skywalker the same cynicism in regard to their role as conduits for their respective religions, both feeling, down deep inside, like a symptom of the disease. The retired Jedi Knight, in hindsight, can see how The Force created Darth Vader, the Sith, and now, Kylo Ren. Tomas, similarly, as a younger man during the Spanish Civil War, saw his fellow pastors side, then benefit with riches and unchecked power, after Nationalist leader Francisco Franco's blood-soaked victory over his enemies, a sort of Resistance. Tomas couldn't reconcile his faith being co-opted by a ruthless dictator. How could Franco, the pastor thought, pray to the same God as him? Not so dissimilar from Darth Vader, during his reign as Supreme Ruler, the former Anakin Skywalker, perverted The Force into a powerful tool of authoritarianism against the Rebel Alliance. Both the Jedi Master and the Lutheran pastor, however, have a responsibility towards their true believers. Jonas is left rudderless by Tomas' suggestion that he turn his back on God. Such egocentric counseling results in a self-inflicted shot to the head by a man who needed a few comforting words. Luke, on the other hand, realizes his mistake. He put Rey's life in mortal danger by sending the girl from Jakku back to fight The First Order without proper Jedi training.
"Mighty Skywalker bloodline," Luke sneers back on the island; a curse, in his decades-long reassessment, becomes a blessing, for the time being, an ideological repreival that lasts just long enough for the Jedi Knight to hold off Ren Kyro from eradicating the last remaining members of the Resistance. The pastor in "Winter's Light" never switches his position on God's existence/silence, but Ingmar Bergman, in real life, possessed second thoughts on the post-physical world, admitting to Marie as such, that in the winter of his life, he has become convinced by what can only be described as empirical magic. Like Luke and Leia, he feels the presence of his late wife Ingrid von Rosen. therefore, the great filmmaker surmises that there must be an afterlife; a long-awaited reunion in the making.
May the force be with Ingmar.