Ingrid Thulin

(On Cable TV, July 2021) At this stage of my tackling Ingmar Bergman’s filmography, I’m reminded of the gag “You’ve seen the best, now see the rest” — considering that I can tolerate roughly two Bergman films and a half (Persona and The Seventh Seal, and I can be talked into bits and pieces of Wild Strawberries), watching the rest of his movies, as they pop up on my automatically-generated list of “what to see next,” is starting to become excruciating. Where Winter Light is concerned, I’m really not interested in going to a small Swedish village in order to hear a priest talk theology and his doubts about God. The austere black-and-white cinematography, along with Bergman’s typically slow-moving direction, certainly does not help. There’s an impression that Bergman is talking out loud, that he’s doing some introspection through the movie screen — that’s good, I suppose, in upholding a filmmaker right to make their work personal. But the rest of us may feel left out of the soliloquy. As usual, there are a few interesting things that do pop up now and again: I found Ingrid Thulin and her character to be far more interesting than the priest’s self-absorption: the film’s best scene has him being unbearably mean to her, hastening her decision to simply get out of there—the closest Bergman gets to a happy ending. As for the rest, though, Winter Light is a very long 81 minutes to sit through, especially given how the film moves without economy and could have fit as a 20-minute subplot in another filmmaker’s snappier film. But so it goes — I’ve seen Bergman’s best, now I have to suffer through the rest.