In the darkness of a breaking dawn, a lascivious, unmarried, expectant woman named Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) dispassionately performs her morning ritual: preparing a fire on the stove, opening the roof door in order to allow the daylight to stream in, invoking the Norse god Odin in an envious and vengeful plea. In another room, the […]
Wild Strawberries captures the thoughtful and compassionate side of Ingmar Bergman rarely seen in his films. It is the story of an aging man’s introspective journey on the meaning of his life, and inevitability of death. Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) is compiling his memoirs in preparation for an honorary degree that he is to […]
A young, weary priest (Claude Laydu) arrives at the rectory of his new parish in Ambricourt on the French countryside, and catches the averted, suspecting gaze of the Count (Jean Riveyre) and his mistress. Frail and weak from a debilitating, undiagnosed stomach ailment, he is resigned to a spartan subsistence of bread, sugar, and wine: […]
The first image of Vanda’s childhood friend, Nhurro is an insightfully intimate one. On the morning of the scheduled demolition of his home – an abandoned house in the slums of Fonthainas that he had taken over and settled into as his own – Nhurro takes a final, almost ceremonial, thorough scrub down bath in […]
The real-life eruption of the Pico volcano in the island of Fogo and the outbreak of cholera in the Cape Verde Islands provide a dense and ingeniously metaphoric contemporary backdrop to Pedro Costa’s exposition on isolation, entrapment, moral inertia, and longing in Casa de Lava. Once an uninhabited Portuguese colony situated off the coast of […]
Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa’s body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa’s first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache […]