Minimum Opus

Gertrud. The young art of film has produced few enough old masters, but any cinematic pantheon must make a place for Carl Dreyer, the Danish director whose reputation rests on a handful of somber, infrequent movie classics, among them The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943). Gertrud, made in 1964, is more museum piece than masterpiece, for this muted and stately study of a woman's quest for perfect love already seems to have been gathering dust for decades. It challenges the ingenuity of coterie critics to prove that any Dreyer movie will gleam like gold with a bit of polishing.

Adapted from a 1906 drama by Swedish Playwright Hjalmar Soderberg, Gertrud dawdles over the plight of an Ibsenish opera singer, a free and independent woman who regards love as unconditional surrender. "The man must belong to me completely," she says, and all intimations of psychological complexity stop right there. Having long since abandoned a famous erotic poet on grounds that he gave too much of himself to his stanzas, Gertrud is about to leave her husband (Bendt Rothe), a lawyer with Cabinet-level aspirations. Briefly, she tries a flighty playboy-pianist who decides that "the complete absorption of one another" as the sine qua non of sensual pleasure is not for him. Life ends, for Gertrud, in white-haired seclusion, though she still declares her credo to be love above all.

The obstacle to credibility in Dreyer's heroine is that her vaunted passion is so easily mistaken for stony inflexibility. As played by a glacial blonde, Nina Pens Rode, the lady appears mesmerized; a reference, for instance, to her "magic charm" becomes a droll unintentional joke. She describes herself, in somewhat fustian language, as drops of dew, a passing cloud or a mouth searching for another mouth, when in fact she behaves most of the time like a mouth searching for a listening ear. Words are Gertrud's weapons, and Dreyer wields them in characteristically slow and painstaking style.

Scene by scene, his compositions are works of art--but nearly always still lifes in which a man and a woman settle themselves on a couch or settee to discuss this thing called hove, both gazing trancelike into the middle distance as if to draw metaphysical meaning from the sheer monotony of it. "I feel I'm staring into a fire that is about to be extinguished," muses Gertrud in a line that expresses the umber tone of the work precisely. The poignant revelation of Gertrud is that Dreyer, now 77, has made an old man's film reverberating with hand-me-down deepthink and reflective sadness.

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