But if you don’t, and your life is overflowing with pain and confusing interactions with estranged family members forced to live with you in a small space, you don’t really get to complain too much about it, because, again, nobody promised you it would go otherwise - least of all Ingmar Bergman. According to Bergman’s ethos, you’re genuinely lucky to find one or two moments of happiness per lifetime. The point of Bergman’s movies - almost all of which center on people drowning in gloom, occasionally coming up for air, only to be shoved back down into the inky darkness - is that the world is bad and life is inherently gnarly. I understand why: In the Before Times, after I’d watch Bergman, I’d float around my house, picking things up and wondering why I had ever bought them in the first place, considering I was just going to die alone in a spotless white nightgown while my siblings gossipped about me in the living room.īut these days, with many of us back in some form of self-isolation after having merely glimpsed what a reopening of society might look like, I experience a new feeling watching the same films: relief.
After 100-plus days of serious research, I can say with certainty that the actual perfect quarantine viewing is the catalogue of Ingmar Bergman, our moody Swedish king of isolation, the most melancholic introvert ever to barricade himself and his loved ones on a small island and write movies about people slowly going insane because they have barricaded themselves on small islands.īergman’s films are famously bleak, the sort of existentially devastating movies that I have never been able to successfully convince anyone to watch with me unless they were already very depressed or experiencing a brief bout with self-destruction.
#1944 BERGMAN FILM MOVIE#
Much has been written, including by me, about how a particular movie or TV show is the “perfect quarantine viewing.” Unfortunately, everyone, including me, was wrong.
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