Jungfrukällan [The Virgin Spring] (1960)

(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) There’s something almost hilariously weird in that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a European art-house classic, has a plot similar to grindhouse nasty The Last House of the Left. In both cases, we have a daughter getting raped and killed by hooligans who happen to seek refuge at the house of the daughter’s parents—and the father exerting bloody revenge. One of these films is considered high art; the other one basic exploitation and the differences are illuminating. In Bergman’s version, the vengeance doesn’t right things, and some atonement will be required—as opposed to the revenge of later American version of the story. Still, for the unaware viewer, the slide from a typical Bergman medieval drama into genre-adjacent revenge territory can be surprising—I somehow didn’t remember the film’s narrative, and was as surprised as anyone else when the film got far more violent than its dull first few minutes suggest. The climactic sequence, with its drawn-out revenge against guilty and innocents alike, is not played like a vengeance fantasy and that may be our biggest clue as to what distinguishes the high and low versions of the same plot. Of course, the Bergman version does conclude on an elegiac note as the father promises to repent for the violence by building a church over the spring that emerged from under his daughter’s corpse—a far, far cry from the grandguignolesque 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left that concluded with a bad guy’s head exploding in a microwave. Somehow, I don’t think Bergman would have approved of that variation.