(1961; b/w Swedish, subtitles) 1962 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film. The title comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12.

The first of Ingmar Bergman's films in a God-vs-Man trilogy (though Bergman insisted there was no connection linking these pictures to one another) that confronts the questions of doubt and faith in God.

A mental patient, Karin (Harriet Andersson), has joined her husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), a medical doctor; her papa (Gunnar Björnstrand); and her 17-year-old brother Minus (Lars Passgård) for a holiday away from the hospital. Her emotionally distant father, David, a novelist, has returned from Switzerland where he had been finishing his most recent book. He hides his anxiety and anguish but later confesses to Martin an attempt to commit suicide. His wife also had been mentally ill before her death.

Karin and her brother act out Minus's brief drama, "The Artistic Haunting or The Tomb of Illusions," of a dead princess who beckons an artist to join her in her crypt of eternity, but at the crucial moment of commitment the artist breaks his promise to her and his art.

Unable to sleep, Karin wanders into an upstairs wallpapered room, experiences a fit, finds her father awake making revisions to his manuscript, and while he's out helping Minus with the fish nets looks in his desk to find his diary. She reads an entry in which her father states that her illness is probably incurable and that he is observing her deterioration for future reference for his writing. With Martin she apologizes for her lack of sexual desire, for her inability to be a good wife to him, and tells him of her discovery in her father's diary. Martin attempts to reassure her with a hope for recovery.

After Martin and David depart in the skiff on errands, Karin teases her brother about a girlie magazine she finds him reading instead of studying his Latin lessons but then tells her brother about the voices that directed her actions earlier in the morning. In all seriousness she admits her willingness to sacrifice her husband for these voices, the voices of those who are waiting with her, yearning for God to reveal Himself through a door upstairs. "It's real," she says to Minus. ""I'm not dreaming. It must be true."

Meanwhile on the skiff, Martin tells David of Karin's confession that she had read his diary and criticizes him for recording the course of her illness, for his always being on the hunt for subject matter, courting some god, rather than life itself, which is why his books were failures at expressing anything beyond artifice. After confiding the secret of his suicide attempt in Switzerland, David tells Martin that from a void of feeling came a birth of genuine love for both his children and for Martin.

Expressing some alarm, Karin tells Minus, "The rain is coming," and runs off. Finding her inside an old boat wreck off a jetty, he tries to comfort her and lies with her cradled in his arms in a strange intimacy.

When Martin and David return they realize that Karin has relapsed into her illness; she says she wants to return to the hospital without any further electroshock treatments. She confesses to her father that the voices had commanded her to do things she cannot resist and "much worse." Her papa says: "We draw a magic circle and shut out everything that doesn't agree with our secret games. Each time life breaks the circle, the games turn grey and ridiculous. Then we draw a new circle and build a new defense."

As they await the arrival of the helicopter to take Karin back to the hospital, she begs them, unbelievers, to wait for God's entrance. As the chopper blades roar outside, a fierce fit overcomes Karin and she runs screaming about the wallpapered room. After Martin has her sedated, she explains her vision of a spider coming through the door with a stony face, calm and cold, climbing onto her but unable to penetrate her: "I have seen God."

After Karin's departure, Minus hesitantly tells his father of his experiencing "reality bursting through." Gently David speaks to his son's questioning God's existence by saying that out of emptiness he has experienced new abundance. Perhaps not a proof of God, but a hint of God's existence can be found in love: maybe love proves God or maybe God is love. The conversation with his father alone makes a deep impression on Minus.

(Watching this film reminded me of Mother Teresa's letters of spiritual darkness, published in Come Be My Light.) However, I interpret Karin's mental illness as a disease of her soul brought on by the irrational religious beliefs upon which she was raised without benefit of family affection.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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