The Silence
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Year Released: 1963
Rating: 2.5
Enigmatic film from the lonely Swede - part three of his Trilogy of Faith - about two sisters and a small boy holed up in a hotel before the start of some unspecified conflict. Unlike the Bergman masterpieces, this one relies too much on symbolism and too little on story, and eventually it becomes the sum of its symbols instead of a 'movie' in the usual sense. The refusal to construct a normal narrative works against the film, and by the end it's merely a collection of glorious pictures with no proverbial glue - an adventure in aesthetics. Bergman's intellectually shabby way of equating the lack of physical love with death and 'free sexuality' as being somehow beneficial is more than a little suspect - the repressed lesbian sister dies but the gallivanting mother and her curious son are 'freed' at the end.
