(1963; b/w Swedish, subtitles) The third film in the so-called trilogy of Ingmar Bergman films has a claustrophobic air of impending doom in which there is no God or at least no significant mention of God.

Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), her young son Johan (Jörgen Lindström), and her older sister Ester (Ingrid Thulin) are on their way home on a train; the boy notices a pair of military officers in the same coach and a passing train hauling military tanks. The weather is hot and stifling; Ester is ill. They get a room in a baroque hotel in Timoka, a town in which the residents speak a different language. Except for an aged waiter (Håkan Jahnberg) and a troupe of dwarves, who later appear in a vaudeville performance in the cabaret, the hotel appears to be otherwise unoccupied.

Innocently curious Johan takes a toy gun with him to explore the hallways, where he looks upon a painting of a pagan scene, a satyr with a naked woman. He willingly lets the dwarves put a dress over his clothes; he urinates in the hallway. Meanwhile his mother ventures outside to a café and then to the theater where a couple copulate in front of her. When Anna returns to the hotel room, the back of her dress has been soiled. Ester, who has remained in the room, lying in bed smoking, drinking, masturbating, and begging God "Let me die at home," interrogates Anna, who after saying she had intercourse with a man from a bar in the cinema, admits they did it in a church where it was cooler.

When Johan asks when they will be going home, he is told Monday and that he will spend part of the year with his Uncle Persson (a singular reference to Winter Light). A tank rolls through the street outside. Ester has established a form of communication with the old waiter while Anna goes out again to another room in the hotel with the man from the bar with whom she has no means of congress other than carnal and to whom she says, "I wish Ester were dead."

Anna rebukes Ester for her intelligence and education, for always wanting everything to be significant and meaningful. "You hate me," Anna says, "just as you hate yourself." Before Anna and her son leave the hotel to catch the train, leaving her sister behind, Ester, who is a translator, gives Johan a letter, her legacy, telling him that he will understand: "Words in a foreign language."

Neither Anna's sensual nor Ester's intellectual experiences can supply them with adequate answers to Johan's fascination with a strange world. His mother could not interpret a sign on the train for Johan; his aunt leaves him with an incomplete list of foreign words for a place and people he may never visit again. Neither has provided him with any spiritual guidance. He will be on his own since we know from Winter Light that the Perssons will be of no help.

A bonus feature on the DVD has Peter Cowie's erudite interpretation of Bergman's film, in which he compares Johan with Minus in Through a Glass Darkly, arguing that both boys represent a hope for the future.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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