Fires were started: Day of Wrath

Though her trial is held in sparely furnished quarters composed of shafts of light, passageways and the shadows of torture devices, rooms where pale, gloomy men in enormous ruffs bend over quills and candles, the execution of Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier) is conducted outdoors on the loveliest summer day, with the sun high in the sky and a children’s choir singing a tune to drown out her cries of agony. It is the 17th century in Denmark and the burning of a frightened old woman is no cause for spoiling the afternoon. Yet Herlofs’ words linger gravely with Reverend Absalon (Thorkild Roose), whose pretty, much younger, and so terribly unsatisfied wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin) has perhaps something of the witch in her, too. Even Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), the Reverend’s son from a previous wife, who’s in love and secretly trysting with Anne, can see it. There are fires in her eyes, he tells her.

Day of Wrath (1943) shares obvious affinities with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s earlier The Passion of Joan of Arc (28), but here the corruption of the oppressive, gynophobic patriarchy is a given, the condemned woman’s disposed of at the outset, and the real drama unfolds methodically through parallel storylines that weave together several characters carefully positioned at distinct points in the social geometry. The men are resigned to a fatalistic status quo, and even Martin can only think of death, or of how things will end, whenever he’s with his beloved, who he ravishes in the woods while his father worries indoors. The women however are all mutually opposed in their disparate bids for transcending a life so fraught with limitations. Anne leaps at any chance for fulfillment, sexual or otherwise, with Martin. Herlofs, who fears not spiritual perdition but mere death, opts for assuming the very role of demonic collaborator that she’s been assigned by the clergy, so as to at the very least put the fear of God into her persecutors. Absalon’s mother (Sigrid Neiiendam), so easy to loathe, is likewise simply taking the only route she deems prudent, one of pious rivalry and maternal martyrdom. She’s always had it out for Anne, and only waits for the ideal conditions to cut her down.

As the performances and camerawork align themselves to Dreyer’s mesmerizing, somewhat theatrical style, with dialogue that’s never more loaded with subtext that when it seems most direct, Day of Wrath moves forward with classical inevitability. Fates are declared, fears announced, weather forbids. The recurring image of an apple tree looms large, reminding us just how profoundly original sin burrows into such minds, and how the real source of anxiety here stems from repressed desires the women are blamed for simply representing. Everything that will come to pass is mapped out in the early scenes with great economy, yet watching how things come to pass offers much suspense, as well as a deeper kind of dread, and that certain pleasure we feel in witnessing something realized with such structural elegance. The interplay of the dictates of flesh and spirit create as bold a dynamic here as in Joan of Arc or Ordet (55), and like those films, Day of Wrath is an absolute masterpiece.

Love in the round: the tightrope world of Sawdust and Tinsel

Before we witness lulling images of a circus caravan wobbling under a dim, rainy Scandinavian sky, before we’re privy to the ongoing love affair between the plump circus owner and his beguiling horseback-riding mistress, before we’re drawn into the rotunda of humiliations and grappling with the impossibility of love, the fanciful opening titles of Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel describe what proceeds as “a broadside ballad on film.” It brings into question the true nature of broad entertainment, what tumultuous personas prop it up, and why, perhaps above all, we’re attracted to their grotesque faces, gaudy spectacle and hysterical laughter. In escapism there is always the shadow of whatever it is we’re trying to escape.

Released in 1953, Sawdust and Tinsel, written and directed by a young filmmaker still struggling for respect in his native Sweden and waiting for that crucial applause from abroad, drifts through the floating world of nomadic entertainers to observe their own particular brand of ordinary madness. The first event is a flashback set on a beach pebbled with soldiers, the image overexposed to evoke the blasted-out feeling of a painful memory. It features an elder member of the circus, the striking but already middle-aged Alma, swimming naked for the amusement of the grunts. Her husband, a gawky clown, comes to remove her from this salacious audience but, when he returns from the sea with his naked spouse cradled awkwardly in his skinny arms, their clothes have been hidden, and he must stumble along the rocky shore to a chorus of laughter.

The scene introduces only minor characters but announcing the major theme: the shame that befalls couples seeking the attention and desires of outsiders yet unable to part from each other. The actual protagonists, Albert (Åke Grönberg) and Anne (the delectable Harriet Andersson), both want to run away from the circus, not to mention each other. Having set up in the town where his abandoned wife and kids reside, Albert will be compelled to return to them and embrace domestic bliss, while Anne will retaliate by courting the local theatre and submitting to the sexual proposition of its lead actor. Yet they cannot escape the circus ring, where marriage must play itself out for better or for worse. Theirs is a poetic, resonant dance of love and its inherent unease, set to seductive images, particularly of mirrors and faces, which Bergman would here begin to close in on with increasingly obsessive focus.

Criterion’s DVD of Sawdust and Tinsel is a highly significant release for enthusiasts whose knowledge of the late master’s work doesn’t predate his initial triumphs Smiles on a Summer Night or The Seventh Seal. Here, we see an auteur finding his mature voice, not to mention the cinematographer who would come to be his greatest stylistic collaborator, Sven Nykvist. The disc features an excellent commentary from Peter Cowie, a short intro from Bergman, and essays from John Simon and Catherine Breillat.

Deadpan ache: Lights in the Dusk

The Helsinki of Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk (Laitakaupungin valot) is a permanently overcast city possessing what should rightfully be deemed one very, very particular power of seduction, one that probably speaks directly to the hearts of some of us while making little impression on others. Seemingly dusted with melancholy, the cityscape is an apparition of earth tones and dim reflections in anonymous glass towers, expansive alleyways, skeletal industrial structures looming over shipyards.

Caught in the generally crepuscular Nordic glow, the setting, like the story, could be from today or 60 years ago. People gather to drink and hover, some arguing the diverse merits of Russian literary giants, some standing in clumps to throb before an almost comically earnest hard rock act. Whatever their numbers, alliances or activities, these Fins are all of them captured within compositions that strongly summon up Edward Hopper paintings nursing a Technicolor hangover, imparting an unmistakable loneliness only heightened by the quiet beauty of their surroundings.

Kaurismäki’s camera however will quickly focus its attention on the solitary figures: a homeless kid, a neglected pooch, and an anachronistically handsome, painfully awkward security guard named Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), the sympathetic schmuck of the center of this exquisitely gloomy neo-noir. Lights in the Dusk is the third installment in Kaurismäki’s ‘Loser Trilogy,’ following 2002’s The Man Without a Past. While the film as a whole arguably adds little novelty to the writer/director’s exploration of the theme, Koistinen is doubtlessly the biggest loser of the lot. And though conveyed entirely in Kaurismäki’s characteristically –some might say perversely– rigorous deadpan, Koistinen’s tale is also quite possibly the most moving of them all, too. Okay, so long as one can be moved by something like a simple gesture, an implication, or the placement of a quartet of fresh bagels before the object of one’s deepest affections.

The plot of Lights in the Dusk is made of pared-down essence, tropes selected and renovated with great affection but precious little gratuitous indulgence. Koistinen is an outsider even among his scant workmates. He boasts to the kind woman who tends the all-night food stand that he’ll be heading his own security operation some day soon, his business aspirations simultaneously humble and hapless, a spiritual cousin to the barber who seeks a new career in dry cleaning in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Truth is Koistinen has few prospects of any kind, and lives in almost total isolation –that is until he’s approached out of the blue one day by Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), a mysterious woman with the most beguiling lips and obscure agenda. His hungry heart is hers from first blush, which means his fate is sealed from here onward.

Mirja is a Mata Hari Hitchcock blonde, a fame fatale working for some antiseptic mobster type who knows a real sucker when he sees one. When she first appears, the normally still camera pushes in on her the same way it does the mobster, an elegant move that binds the two in our memories and exemplifies the austerity of Kaurismäki’s approach, which crafts a distinctive style from economy itself. (The whole thing’s over in 74 minutes.) No shot is too long, no pan uncalled for, no facial muscle moved that isn’t fundamentally necessary here, though so much of it is nonetheless eccentric –a guy sharpens a steak knife with the base of a mug– often dryly funny, and shot through with repressed emotion and plenty of terrific zingers. If you know this guy’s movies you know exactly what I mean: Kaurismäki’s is the comic Bresson.

Mirja’s discomfort with shamelessly using Koistinen as a way of helping the mobsters steal some jewels from one of the properties under his watch is palpable, in an inferred sort of way. Early on in their non-love affair it’s already clear to both that everything’s a ruse –Mirja gets to a point she doesn’t even make the slightest effort to fool him anymore– but Koistinen can’t help but do anything other than obey Mirja’s will, even when it spells out complete ruin. It’s all so strange, even frustrating, on the surface but perfectly heartbreaking underneath. This stuff works on me, even more with repeated viewings.

The title evokes twilit haziness, a moment when signs of life or signs of hope blur into the day’s fading embers. The film’s complimentary story and tone meanwhile do provide us with some consolation, acts of solidarity, will, and enduring love that linger in the margins of its milieu, waiting for our hero to see past the haze and embrace what’s really present and attainable. So even though Kaurismäki lets his loser take a licking, and flashes it all past our eyes with merciless efficiency, there’s a warmth waiting at the end of all this, a candle in the window that should charm and reward each of us predisposed to such subtle delights.