February 20, 2008
The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 4: Carl-Theodor Dreyer's "Ordet".
I thought it might be fruitless to write about a film that thousands of other people have written about in the past five decades, particularly one which for some reason left me cold the first time. But it was only last year when, after repeated viewings -- to use a quote from Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) in a different context -- "something snapped inside me."
Ordet seems, in an odd way, to unfold outside of time, but of course its concerns are as bound to time and place as any other: the action happens in a windswept Danish farmhouse in the fall of 1925. It's a cramped but cozy interior, and probably something of a hothouse for the disappointments, large and small, harbored by the patriarch, Morten Borgen. These inner hurts are revealed slowly, indeed very slowly -- "the nearest thing to immobility that the screen has thus far achieved," Richard Hatch apparently wrote dismissively in The Nation, which is so blastedly wrong in many respects. But the snail's pace also lets the minute, warm intimacies between the family members blossom, and the unfussy camera, in the inimitable Dreyer fashion, patiently records the family dynamics as they move into their respective halos of Dreyer's light. (I say cramped interiors because there's an obvious contrast to the luminous exteriors, with feathers of light descending upon waves of grass.)
The family's characters feel like they're roughly carved directly from Catholic doctrine, i.e., everyone seems to represent something, but I'm not actually sure Dreyer meant to trouble his audiences with doctrinal differences (as explained below). Morten has three sons: there is Mikkel, the agnostic, who is married to the angelic Inger, about to give birth. The youngest son, Anders, is in love with the tailor's daughter, but she is of a different sect -- and those differences are, tellingly, never really spelled out by Dreyer, probably because they do not matter -- and therefore their partnership can never be.
And finally, there is Johannes, the gaunt, bearded son who has gone unblinkingly insane -- how exactly I don't want to reveal, only to point out that it provokes a laugh in a sometimes dryly funny film -- and believes he is Jesus Christ. He is the key figure in this film for different reasons, yet his presence is confined to a perhaps deliberately alienating physical acting: he pops into rooms unannounced to deliver his judgments, shuffling in a trance (like all the main characters), his rapt attention almost always focused on something just off to the audience's side, an ear cocked toward the divine whisperings in his head.
Dreyer opens up Kaj Munk's play with exteriors (and in the final scene the interior is opened up radically), but chooses to leave the theatrical sight-lines intact; people twist away oddly from each other, just like the inquisitors in The Passion of Joan of Arc, or are staring off into space. It is by no means a filmed play, but it's a strangely constrictive move; people have entire conversations without once looking at each other. But it is no less peculiar than, for instance, Johannes' performance, or the surreally casual conversation about death between Johannes and Inger's daughter. (The camera movements aren't stagey, however, as the frame almost always expands in anticipation of new characters entering on either side.)
Perhaps there is little, especially in an explicitly religious film, to appeal to an apostate like myself grown intolerant of Christian piety. When Inger talks reassuringly about God performing small, secret miracles every day, there's something almost cloying in this sentiment. But then why, even on later viewings, was I already sobbing, tears flowing down my face, by the time one of the characters appears at the door in the final scene?
Structurally, artistically, the sheer jawdropping impossibility of Dreyer's ending transmutes itself, especially with repeated viewings, into something so right, so necessary, that it is difficult to see the film culminating in any other way. (One could even argue that it is necessary for the audience's disbelief to make the ending, and the film itself, actually work; you have to make that leap.) Which therefore accounted for my emotional reaction: just knowing what was going to happen next attested, somehow, to the inevitability of amazing grace. Ordet, a genuine miracle of cinema, is simply, stunningly, perfect in every way, inexhaustible in its mysteries.
Posted by the wily filipino at February 20, 2008 12:47 AM