Wonderful close-ups. Bergman achieves effortless shifts in tone.
With the two extended boating sequences, Bergman photographs the same sort of scenery but the departure from the city is a liberation, as if passing beneath the tunnels of the waterway is to escape the notice and gravity of society. Upon the return, a change in lighting and composition conveys drudgery and despair even without the assistance of the foreboding music.
This is my third film by Powell and Pressburger and I am so very impressed by their sensibilities. They seem to exhibit all the virtues of the British gentry and few of their flaws.
It could not have been a popular view in 1943 to implicate the failure of the British to rehabilitate Germany after world war one in the subsequent rise of the Nazi party. The battle against fascism is an existential one, in which there is no room for the manners and vainglorious "sporting nature" of the British, noble as it may seem.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
When I first saw this film just before lockdown, my cinematic knowledge was rudimentary to say the least and I had no idea who Céline Sciamma was, and yet from the very first scene I knew I was in the capable hands of a master. Humbly but insistently, each subsequent frame demanded my patience and attention and I sat transfixed, in feverish anticipation of that inevitable moment when the film would overwhelm me with tears and insight. Now, upon my…
Where Shakespeare goes for melodrama, Eggers instead grits his teeth and opts for cold, unrelenting violence.
Despite the same tangible period accuracy as in his prior work, this time the scope and scale (read: the budget) appears to run away from him. The central story and its thematic weight gets lost amidst the admittedly beautiful shots of the vast landscape.
Amleth's lust for vengeance is so unyielding and so single-minded that the audience simply has no way in - and yet neither can it look away.
