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This begrudging and angry film is against not just the war during which it was made, but all war. It doesn't care what war it is. It might be the most emotionally involving experience I have ever had with Ingmar Bergman's work. There are no sides to the two main characters in this impacting drama, which doesn't intimate a point in any ceremonial symbolism as per Bergman's usual, but plainly showcases people and their lives and exercises what Bergman has already proved he understands about a person's reaction to a movie.
His top-drawer regulars Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow play an internalizing but bickering married couple who were once orchestra musicians. Now they live in a weathered farm house on an island. Part of the building frustration we grow to share with these two people fertilizes in the detail that nothing in their house seems to work. They are not reclusive intellectuals, either. They are a rather familiar marriage that has more or less resigned from life and is essentially apolitical; they only get wind of distant rumors of a war that has been going on forever. Ullmann is concerned with the danger to their lives and to her desire to bear children. Her husband Von Sydow shrugs off that the war will pass them by. Their serenity is interrupted by screaming fighter planes flying low over their house, the killing of a parachuting airman, the arrival of dubious troops, their inquisition, and eventually their capture by what appears to be the local side, but loyalties have long since splintered.
They are sent back to their home, witness gratuitous destruction and suffer the vindictive consequences of such an agonizingly distrustful marriage. This, one of my top favorite Bergman efforts, is a study of a couple jarred from their safely self-unaware lives and violated by a manipulative despair, testing them both to reveal who they really are. She lacks compassion to some extent, too self-serving and restless to have any patience for his capricious breakdowns into crying. His suppressed emotional issues have led to the repression of the very initiative and excitement that attracted them to begin with. The immense last twenty minutes, sporadically interrupted by images of the overwhelming gray sky, are among the closest to real emotion that Bergman ever filmed.
All systems of dogma and faith are the antagonists in this very essential and downbeat portrait. The basically clearcut personalities of Ullmann and Von Sydow's characters are hurled into the degenerate world of war because they are accused of being "sympathizers," but the film, shot on Bergman's small home island of Faro, doesn't give any information about where or when it's set, who the two sides are, and for what they're fighting. To an uninvolved civilian caught in between, the knowledge base is likely to be quite similar.
Ullmann and Von Sydow are not sympathizers for the apparent enemy, but they're partisans for who are apparently their side. This 1968 reactive allegory could be about the common noncombatant citizens of Iraq, or Kosovo, or Vietnam, or Israel, or Palestine, or...


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