The Virgin Spring (1960)

Not rated, but this movie's lynchpin is about the rape and murder of a little girl.  The rape happens on screen and it is pretty brutal, despite not having nudity in this scene.  However, there is some nudity in another scene and the violence throughout the movie is pretty rough.  Also, another child is killed later in the film.  It isn't an easy movie to watch.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Oh my gosh, I have so much work to do right now, but I'm sitting at Tire Discounters waiting for my car to be fixed.  I figured, if I'm going to do anything without my work resources with me, I can at least get some writing done.  Honestly, if I can get this uploaded before I leave, I can at least have no distractions about stupid things later.  I think that I'm discovering that my productivity has a lot of context behind my choices.

I've been feeling somewhat burdened by my journey through Bergman's films.  I know that I was always kind of chided (in the nicest way!) when it came to my obsession with retrospectives when it came to catching up on directors because of this exact reason.   Watching one auteur's entire oeuvre leads to burnout and I was getting that over the course of the last few films.  But then I remembered why I got excited to watch the Bergman films to start off with because there are some absolute gems.  Since I'm dancing around this, The Virgin Spring is an absolute banger of a movie.  It's top tier Bergman, which always suprises me.  It's this and The Seventh Seal that play with historical fiction, a subgenre that often leaves me cold.  I think it is because his contemporary films always feel so self-indulgent.  When people are wallowing in their own selfish miseries, it feels like we have so many alternatives to that kind of behavior.  I kind of whined about The Silence, even though I acknowledge that there was something brilliant about the movie.

See, with a film like The Silence, set in a fictional country, these women are being cruel to one another when there is really no environmental factor that drives them to act this way.  I suppose that Bergman is arguing the very nature of existence forces us to be selfish jerks to one another because we're in constant pain.  That is an argument.  I can't deny that it is an argument.  I don't necessarily subscribe to this philosophy.  I mean, the Tire Discounters that I'm sitting in is pretty cold and devoid of humanity.  It doesn't mean that I feel the need to destroy the world around me with my sexual frustrations.  But when you watch something like The Virgin Spring, the social norms seem so much looser.  Everything in The Virgin Spring seems like it allows for bigger personalities because there is no societal codes saying that you couldn't be that way.  If anything, those personality types, which are large and in charge, act as survival tools. Tore is a zealot because he carries that true, 13th century-style fear of the Lord.  All of his joys and miseries are because of his thoughts that about the moral choices that he has made throughout his life.  After all, the only social interaction that he has are the people inside of his home and the church, which is a noticable distance from the house.  You can honestly go down the list of characters and ascribe their dominant trait to a lack of social convention coupled with a need to survive.

It's kind of what makes Karin the ultimate victim in this story.  As much as almost all the characters harbor some kind of ignorance about themselves,  Karin's ignorance is the only one that is fed by those around her.  She starts the movie as the only carefree person.  She --appropriately enough --understands that since the candles are too late to be used for service, there is no real rush to get to the church.  From her ignorance, the Little Red Riding Hood story starts.  I'm assuming that the Grimm's fairy tale is far more gruesome than anything that I grew up with, but the result is still that she is ultimately consumed by the monsters in the woods.  But her death is, by consequence, a wake up call to all of the crimes that each character harbors in their own hearts.  Shy of the actual monsters, who get their comeuppance at the hand of Tore, the characters seem to one-by-one take responsibility for the death of Karin. 

The funny thing is that Karin, right before her death, makes herself pretty unlikable.  I mean, Karin is meant to be a sympathetic character.  She's the only one who loves life.  She's almost a Disney princess with the amount of happy things that happen to her (a sign that I'm not taking this Disney Princess analogy too seriously).  She sees the world as a bright and glorious place.  Even when her sleeping in affects others, she isn't scolded for her laziness.  Instead, she's celebrated by even the gruffest of fathers, who allows her shannigans to go by undiscussed.  

But the reason that we don't like her is that she has no sense of community with others.  Ingeri lives as a foil to her.  For what few consequences that Karin experiences for her blissful life, it seems like Ingeri has adopted those miseries.  She follows Karin into the woods, acting like a pregnant and wreched hag.  She is always angry and upset because none of her tough life come from her own choices.  And that's the moment that Karin becomes the bad guy.  It's only for a moment, but what Karin says is so ignorant, it almost welcomes the universe to strike her down.  When Ingeri discusses the burdens of pregnancy, Karin swears that she could never be raped.  If she was raped, she would simply fight them off.  I refuse to divorce this discussion from the sexual violence component, but that is perhaps the most real-world ignorance that people carry.  I knew a guy who used to claim that school shooting victims shouldn't really be mourned because if a school shooter ever entered his building, he would just attack the guy.  It's this separation from reality that just comes across as silly given any sense of reality.

But Bergman does more than simply make a philosophical argument for people's need for self-analysis.  From a storytelling perspective, The Virgin Spring is actually pretty darned great.  I mentioned Little Red Riding Hood earlier, which might be on the nose a bit.  The Virgin Spring is based on a 13th century legend / poem.  As such, there is a structure there that creates coincidences that we don't really get in contemporary storytelling.  (Again, 13th century works because of a lack of overpopulation.)  The fact that these three men stumble across Karin's house and try selling Karin's dress to the mother is so horrifying.  Bergman feeds that dramatic irony so well that the rest of the movie comes across as an insane revenge film.  When Mom bolts them in that room, it's kind of glorious.  Yeah, the movie could have been more exploitative, making it a slow and torturous story of violence awakened.  Still, the fact that Tore ends up killing the child against the protestations of mother is a solid moment.  

It's a great story done really well.  Yeah, I'm a little shaken by the titular "virgin spring" that pops up at the end of the movie, implying that Karin was somehow a saint or that Tore's declaration that he will build a church on that spot makes God happy.  It does open the door to the notion that God took away Tore's daughter out of a need for worship.  But that's in line with Bergman anyway, so I'll allow it.  Still, the movie slaps so hard.  I dug this one a lot.