Back to Back 46 - Road Trip or Stroll, the Journey's Just the Same
Comparing stories of lonely souls finding themselves on a journey
Wild Strawberries (1957) - director, writer Ingmar Bergman
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) - director, writer Agnès Varda
Isak: It’s as if I’m trying to say something to myself [in dreams] which I don’t want to hear when I’m awake.
Marianne: And what would that be?
Isak: That I’m dead, although I live.
Film is undoubtedly one of the most fitting mediums in which to explore dreams. A road trip is in some ways like a dream - outside of ordinary life, a space where the subject is travelling through unknown spaces, exploring. So a road movie full of dreams seems to be the perfect combination. It's in the interplay of dreams, memories and the journey that the drama - in a superficial sense, no more than a melodrama about an embittered father and a marriage in need of reconciliation - will find its resolution. Just as in previous road trip movies that we've examined, the destination, when it's reached, is the least important part. What's entertaining, and possibly enlightening, is the journey undertaken.
It's typical to see in the film the journey of Dr Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) from embittered loneliness and egotism to a renewed hope and empathy. There's a parallel journey undertaken by his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) who in her case already has empathy and a kind of resolute optimism, but intends to resolve the uncertainty of her marriage and her impending motherhood by returning to her husband, Isak's son Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand), infected with the same.
So it can be viewed as an exploration of the question: "What makes people self-obsessed and bitter, overcome with despair and mistrust of others?" We have a number of examplars of this type of person: Isak himself, a crabby and borderline malicious individual at the start of the story, who reacts with cold hostility to his daughter-in-law Marianne and insists on being left out of her matrimonial troubles when she is seeking his help as mediator.
He is disturbed by dreams presaging death and is beset by fears and a growing sense of guilt that will erupt in a nightmare of Kafkaesque dimensions where he accused of "guilt" in a sinster tribunal. Also present to represent the 'Death Party' of coldness and personal alienation is Isak's 95-year-old mother and a toxic married couple whose company is intolerable for the hate and bitterness they exude. Toward the end we get a vision of Isak's son Evald who is very much on the side of death, but is available, like his father, to be redeemed.
But we could turn the question on its head and ask "Why isn't everybody consumed with passion and empathy all the time?" This would be the question as posed by Sara (Bibi Andersson), a young hitchhiker that Isak picks up along with her friends/lovers, a pair of passionate and callow boys. Sara is the symbolic, in fact literal, reincarnation of his first love, cousin Sara, who collected wild strawberries with Isak's ne'er-do-well brother and wound up marrying him, repelled by Isak's rectitude and coldness.
The new and living Sara triggers an instantaneous change in Isak, making the cranky old man open and welcoming. Soon after, in an encounter with a local gas-station attendant (Max von Sydow), we learn that Isak, as a young country doctor, was generous and caring, and was loved by all in the district. "I should have stayed here", he reflects - not necessarily in this physical place, we understand, but in this state of empathy.
Both versions of the question - "Why do people 'go bad'?" and its converse "Why don't people stay 'good'?" - are explored through dreams and memories, chance encounters on the road, and discussions resembling therapy sessions between Isak and his daughter-in-law Marianne. She has an impressively mature grasp on life's priorities, and radiates a serene calm that's only punctured by her own uncertainty with regard to her husband and his shaky relationship with his father, which she senses to be at the root of it all. Her manner with him is not hostile or resentful, but she's determined to give him some no-nonsense truths:
Isak: And I know that Evald understands and respects me.
Marianne: That may be true, but he also hates you.
The answer to these questions is not complex, it's in fact what anyone with a knowledge of families would expect it to be. There's no novel insight in Bergman's verdict on these issues of personality, but rather it's the richness of the story of getting there that excites admiration. It's deeply textured with repeated images which appear both in waking and dreaming worlds (such as blasted trees, symbolic of a family line given over to sterility), and sounds are overlaid - babies crying, clocks ticking - that seem to connect the conscious and unconscious realms.
Even personalities appear in new and magically transformed ways - we've already mentioned how Sara appears both as childhood memory and as modern teen, but the strange and toxic husband Alman (Gunnel Broström), a pathetic character from a pathetic incident in daytime, becomes a forceful and sinister accuser in Isak's Kafka-style dream, urging forgiveness and redemption. Why this man, who in real life has shown no redeeming qualities at all, should become accuser, judge and deliverer in dreams, is an enigma wthout an answer - which is how dreams tend to be.
The phenomenon of film is to a very large extent based on attempts to make the spectator lose his/her grip on the commonsensical distinction between dreams and reality... A "dreaming mind" is present behind each screen and it invents an aesthetic structure through which thoughts are expressed. Whatever this structure might look like, there is no narration in a conventional sense of the word.
Thorsten Botz-Bernstein, Films and Dreams (2007), p39
This is the essence of the film, the dream sequences and their close relatives, the "reveries" as Isak calls them, that are the insertion of his old-man self into the past world of his youth. These are not 'flashbacks' in the conventional sense, but rather dreamlike constructions in which he (the now-self) participates. It's characteristic of Bergman's psychological sophistication that these past-sequences are not conventional flashbacks, a filmic trope that can only be a lie if presented straightforwardly, but something blending flashback with dream and fantasy. And of course these fantasy constructions, dream and reverie, interact with the waking life, which is itself a rigidly-structured narrative of a journey.
They are of course centred on themes of life and death - babies and graves, wild strawberries - seen as a communion offering to life in The Seventh Seal (1957) - and the dusty forsaken dolls neglected in a box. In dreams, dead people come to life. The living see themselves as corpses in a coffin. The boundaries are blurred and uncertain. But in the bitter daytime imagining of the Borg family, grandmother, father and son Evald, the boundaries are clear again and the choices are stark:
Edvald [to Marianne]: We act according to our needs... Yours is a hellish desire to live and to create life... Mine is to be dead. Absolutely dead.
Critics have analysed the way the road-trip narrative follows a parallel path, away-from (Stockholm, isolation) and toward (Lund-reconcilation), with the lunch sequence and the recitation of a poem that is a hymn and a love lyric dead in the middle. It means that beyond a patchwork of dream narratives and a chamber-piece set in a car, beyond a road movie, it is also a form of ritual, a theatre with its own rules of transformational magic. This at least is what Bergamn seemed to believe about his own work. Though an atheist and a 'rational man of the Enlightenment', he believed that the unconscious and the human spirit operated in its own magic world, and this film is one more exploration of that world of dream and ritual.
— INTERMISSION —
Ugliness is a kind of death. As long as I'm beautiful, I'm even more alive than the others.
Clèo's inner thoughts at 5:07 pm, on gazing into the mirror which recedes in an abyssal forever
Once my lit professor (professor of literature, that is, not a professor lit on drugs or simply all exciting and 'fire') commented on James Joyce's Ulysses: "it's just two fellas wandering around Dublin in a day." Similarly, Virginia Wolf's Mrs Dalloway is about a woman wandering around London one day.
But that's just the most superficial reading possible (and the prof knew that, simply hoping to get a rise out of some blasé students); the stories, simply because they go into so much depth of the interiority of the character, convey so much more . And they are also hoping to say something about the vitality and energy of everyday life, particularly the vibrancy of a big city. Moreover, in Joyce's case, he is attempting to add a layer of mythical depth to all this humdrum life.
Agnès Varda is doing all of that too in Cléo from 5 to 7, with a deceptively simple tale - in near-real-time - of a pop star waiting to hear the results of her cancer biopsy test. By contrast with the novel as art form, the chance to incorporate wonderful prose is almost gone, except in a few interior monologue fragments which give up a few gems but are not the focus of this work. But conversely, film is a visual medium and, like Kubrick, Varda trained as a photographer, and understood the art of composition intimately. So the movie is packed with visual beauty, and there is barely a frame that doesn't deliver a visual delight.
The editing is in that jumpy, jittery style common to the early French New Wave, and made more famous by Jean-Luc Godard. And yet not always; it seems to follow, in an expressionistic way, the interior state of the protagonist so that when she is nervous the jump-cuts predominate - as when she witnesses frog-vomit-man on a Paris street corner. But when she feels more serene - in the park, in the sculpture studio - the cuts are longer and the camera movements more stately. In this respect this use of editing style is far superior to Godard's, since it adds additional emotional texture to the scenes.
Indoors and outdoors, the setup is created to incorporate fascinating visual tableaux, such as the café where Cléo (Corinne Marchand) meets her assistant Angéle (Dominique Davray), which gives way to a virtual split-screen effect with one set of characters chatting offscreen to the left, in the mirror, while another pair of characters has a lovers' tiff on the right side of the screen. Cléo is to the left, reflected in a mirror, listening in on both conversations but participating in neither.
Another scene, almost miraculous in its incorporation of closely-rehearsed interior blocking and framing with exterior action that couldn't possibly be directed, and must be taken as found, is when Cléo tries on various hats in the milliner shop while the presidential horse guard troop by outside. It's a wonder of visual complexity and at the same time builds on both a psychological state of mind - Cléo's uncertainty - and a creative juxtaposition of visual stimuli (the hats, the cavalry) and the audio stimulus of massed horses on cobblestone.
Or the playful and yet somehow doom-laden way that Cléo swings in her airy loft, a Parisian paradise, with giant wings on the wall behind her giving her an angelic aura. Angelic or soon-to-be an angel? It's a playful motif, both another memento mori like the African death masks and the tarot card bearing the Reaper, but also a promise of an elevated condition. It's significant, perhaps, that the great turning comes just after this, that Cléo will perform her song which turns her from light to dark, stripping off her Bardot sex-kitten wig and starting her true journey.
There were very few critics then who saw past the "feminine simplicity" cliché to recognise a deceptively complex work wrapped in a simple storyline. There are very few critics now prepared to see past the simplification of the film as a feminist tract and recognise it as a great work of cinematic art beyond the level of culture-war polemic. But it is arguably the truest film of many in this era charged with that existentialist quest to find meaning and fulfilment in the face of death and in the context of absolute personal freedom to choose this or that response to the challenges of death.
A contrast with the much more famous exemplar of early French New Wave, and vehicle for much meditation on existentialist challenge, is enlightening. In Jean-Paul Godard's Breathless [À bout de souffle] (1960), there is the archetypal existentialist anti-hero, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo):
He is a rebel, he appears to be totally free, the master of his own fate, but in fact, he is constantly playing a role: that of ‘rebel’, ‘gangster’ and ‘lover’...As many have pointed out, Michel is considerably influenced by popular culture. He adopts Humphrey Bogart’s mannerisms and plays a variety of roles, even to his death.
Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 a 7 (2007) p48
Michel in Breathless is essentially playing at being free, using infantile behaviour copied at second hand from a Hollywood entertainment - and Godard was at least partly aware of the hollowness of his gestures towards existential freedom. He approaches death with insouciance, but only because he's conceived it as a game in the manner of a cops-and-robbers scenario from a noir film - we might think of how the amateur gangsters of Band of Outsiders [Bande à part] (1964) literally play shootout on the street like little boys. So though Michel and other Godardian protagonists may have chosen freely to approach life and death in this way, and so satisfy one tenet of existentialist freedom, their mediated identities are hardly authentic.
From the mid-point of 'Chapter 7' onwards, when Cléo has stripped away her pop-star identity, her wig and her ye-ye girl dress, to walk the streets adrift in an angst-ridden journey, she has now become a flâneuse - the feminine of the flâneur, that central French intellectual identity. It is the freedom of wandering around on Parisian streets observing human behaviour that figures like Flaubert, Baudelaire, and later Louis Aragon and Walter Benjamin, acquired their freedom. This was a role denied to women, who if seen walking around alone were viewed as "streetwalkers", not explorers - George Sand used to disguise herself as a man to go on her nighttime walks. Now, though Cléo garners a lot of curious and even hostile stares, a woman may become a flâneuse, and if there is a feminist message in this film it is very simply that - women have the freedom to wander.
Roger Tailleur wrote in the arts journal Positif, “Cléo is... both the freest of films and the film that is the greater prisoner of constraints, the most natural and the most formal, the most realistic and the most precious, the most moving to see and the most pleasant to watch.” I have nothing more to add to that summation. This is one of the great films of the French New Wave, and of the 20th Century.
I just love the Nerdwriter’s video essay on Cléo from 5 to 7 and very much recommend a watch: