Enigma Variations

The quality of an obsession should be measured not only by its height but also by its length. Ingmar Bergman's towering concern has endured a lifetime, and it has centered on a single theme: the silence of God. Of late, that silence has been as clamorous as a scream in such films as The Hour of the Wolf and Shame. With The Passion of Anna the Lord takes discernible form. "This time," the narrator declares, "his name was Andreas." But given the trappings of speech and senses, the earthly incarnation remains spiritually mute.

Andreas Winkleman (Max von Sydow) is an inhabitant of that vital Bergmanian metaphor, an isle off the Swedish coast. Bearded, racked, his Christlike face appears to be a skull in rented skin. Indeed, his humanity is as transient as his lust. Andreas' only "friend" is Elis (Erland Josephson), a corrupt architect who shrewdly offers Andreas his money and haplessly lends him his frigid wife Eva (Bibi Andersson). She proves but a temporary distraction.

Divorced from his own wife as from the world, Andreas spends most of his days with Anna (Liv Ullman), whose husband and son have recently perished in a grisly auto accident. She insists that her marriage was ideal; actually it was calamitous. She claims to feel love emanating from Andreas; in fact he has no conception of the term. In Rollo May's phrase, "Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is." Love's opposite is all that Andreas can summon.

In this vacuum of affections, the film is played out in what amounts to musical form. Other directors may prate of their McLuhanesque approaches to movies. Bergman has quietly composed nonlinear work for more than two decades. The Passion is like a string quartet in which four master players reciprocally sound enigmatic variations on a theme. Nature evaporates into images and dreams; the irrational becomes the true ruler of the universe; in graphic scenes, eros and death are exposed like lovers caught in flagrante.

Cued by Clap-Stick. Correspondingly, Bergman's troupe are less actors than musicians. Cued by the bang of a cinematographer's clap-stick, each performer is allowed to stop the flow of the film and analyze the character that he or she is portraying. That now-familiar device stems from what Brecht called the V-Effekt: estranging the audience from the action. Merely watching, say Brecht and Bergman, is not enough. Reality has rent the artist's fabric; now he forces it to pierce the viewer's mind.

At the film's conclusion, Andreas is no longer insensate. The fury that has lurked and flickered behind his eyes bursts with lethal force. He attacks Anna and with that action breaks his silence. But it is then that he most craves isolation, and abandons her. He is finally seen walking back to their house, then wavering, then walking away, then wavering, as if he were consigned forever to crucial indecision. It is a life of ceaseless dread, a tragedy deprived of nobility.

Even in a secular age, there are many artists who can be called religious. Bergman, the minister's alienated son, alone can be considered holy. His fatalism has an undertow of sublimity. His films are chapters in a coherent--if desperate --philosophy: Worship God or deny him; rage if you will, love if you can. But feel. For in the universal paradox, what God cannot, man must.

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