A young nurse named Alma (Andersson) and her patient, well-known stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who has suddenly stopped speaking, move to a cottage, where Alma cares for Elisabet, confides in her, and begins having trouble distinguishing herself from her patient.
Followed by a Q&A discussion with Solomon Bowden and Marlene Favata
Liv Ullmann
The Ritz, Penzance
The Ritz, Penzance
Reviews
Thoughts
An actress stops speaking mid-performance and does not start again. A nurse is assigned to her, taken to a house by the sea, and given the job of talking to a woman who will not reply. Care becomes confession, then something closer to theft, though never clearly in one direction. Bergman tells us what this is before the story starts: a projector threading up, a boy reaching toward a face, images of horror and beauty. This is a poem, not a narrative. When the film's central question arises, two different answers are allowed to stand.
The refusal of simple answers, whether embracing the dream or confronting hope, is the template for this season; 3 Women, Miroirs and The Sacrifice all borrow the permission Bergman took here. And the reason silence exists at all is worth attending: Elisabet is not mute out of mystery. Two of the most famous images in cinema show us precisely what she has seen on a screen from far away, and why speech has come to feel obscene to her. Ben Hania puts that same material at the centre of the frame rather than the edge; Bergman burns the film strip rather than proceed. Between them they define the season's overall question: what cinema can carry, and where it gives way.