Christopher Hudson on Bergman and Warhol obsessions
A spacious country house in Sweden at the turn of the century. It is four o'clock in the morn:ng. As clocks tick in the gloomy red rooms, Agnes wakes up and listens. Suddenly she hunches in pain. Her face contorts and her lips draw back in an agonised grimace. Her jaw drops, in a soundless scream. Do we know what is happening? In a moment she is going to get up out of bed and write in her diary, It is Monday morning and I'm in pain.
She is being watched over by her two sisters, who are physically in good shape but nevertheless exude a profound disquietude of spirit. They have come to nurse Agnes in her dying days, and to add her death to that long list of experiences which they have borne with stoical and despondent fortitude. They have come alone, leaving husbands and children elsewhere, in order to prey upon each other and relive memories of the past. Maria, the youngest, remembers seducing the local doctor and driving her husband to near-suicide. She feels guilt. Karen, the eldest, remembers plunging broken glass between her legs and smearing her face with the blood to repel the advances of her repulsive, ageing husband. She feels guilt. The house around them, hung in sombre red, is the womb from which their repressions emerge and multiply. Rare bubbles of communicated grievance burst out of the sludge of unspoken melancholy. Mostly the clocks tick and the house is still. Anna the housemaid is not to be done out of the general suffering. She once bore a child which Agnes looked after until it died. When Agnes expires, after hideous pain observed by the camera with unsparing pity, Anna dreams that her spirit haunts the house. Agnes calls out for her sisters to comfort her restless ghost, but they will not. Only Anna will go devotedly and lay the dead woman's head upon her bared breast. Right at the end Anna uncovers a keepsake — Agnes's diary — and reads from a page written a few weeks before her death. Agnes is describing a page written a few weeks before her death. Agnes is describing her last outing in the park, a summer interlude snatched from the gathering shades. The lake is blue; the grass is green; the sun is shining. The three sisters, white parasols and wide white hats among the trees, sit Agnes, innocent of guilt, this is a moment of utter happiness. In such contentment she finds perfection.
Of course it is Bergman. Who else could it be? Cries and Whispers (' X ' Curzon) is the latest and most claustrophobic of his closet tragedies. Neither sparse enough to arouse elemental anxieties nor willing to relate to any recognisable present, it mooches and slouches through the welltrodden range of obsessions we have come to regard as evocative of Nordic gloom. The innocent borne down by physical suffering through whose example the guilt cf cthers may be expiated is a theme not unfamiliar to Western art, but rarely can It have been handled so perversely. Of course the cinematography is expert, and the performances effective. Bergman's actresses lead from the belly. But as long as Bergman thinks of the soul (and he does) as a damp membrane in varying shades of red, his anatomies of melancholy will bring forth no new discoveries: only a stale wind.
Karen's trick with the broken glass is repeated less messily by Holly Woodlawn with a beer bottle in Trash C X' London Pavilion). At least, we are led to believe it's a beer bottle, but since this is one of the passages to have been shortened by the censor (another is Joe Dallasandro drawing blood with a heroin needle), the sequence emerges as less explicitly shocking than Bergman's. The trouble with Trash is that in being comparatively honest about the sexual lives of its extraordinary protagonists it lays itself wide open to unfairly savage criticisms — such as those in the Sun and the Daily Mirror of all places — levelled at its nudity, strong language and sexual openness before the camera. In fact Trash is a consistently entertaining and even instructive film, though it hardly deserves such a major release. It is made not by Andy Warhol but by his side-kick Paul Morrissey who, here as in Flesh, has managed to retain the effect of improvisaCon without the boredom that accompanied it when Warhol was behind the camera. And without trailing the red herring of morality, it is possible to see that a film about impotence resulting from heroin addiction, made by people who live and work among drug addicts, could have as one of its side-effects a practical deterrent force.
Joe, a sleepy, amiable, unintelligent dropout, is pestered by a number of women who want to have sex with him. The first, a well-breasted stripper, having failed to rouse Joe directly, goes through a complicated song-and-dance routine with coloured lights and moving screens. Joe asks politely for a glass of water. The second girl — the ex-male Holly Woodlawn, undoubtedly the star of the film — does her best, and is upset when Jae falls fast asleep. Next, Joe is accosted by a girl in the street who offers him twenty-five dollars for some LSD. Joe takes the money and goes to her flat where she watches in frustration as he gives himself a fix. Sex with her proves equally limp. "Shall I beat you?" he suggests hopelessly. She declines. A strange sequence follows where Joe tries to burgle a flat, is taken pity on by the girl who lives there, and is given a bath. Later he sits by glumly as Holly Woodlawn brings back a schoolboy who wants a fix. She takes his money and sticks a (probably) empty needle in him while he goes through agonies of anticipation and terror. But Holly isn't getting what she wants and is furious when, returning one day from stealing furniture off garbage neaps, she finds Joe on her bed with her heavily-pregnant sister. Holly and Joe end up begging state welfare, but that is refused them too.
As with Flesh, the episodic construction of the film is irritating and fascinating at the same time. There is no narrative progression, but the scabrous humour and often lively passages of dialogue ensure that even if Joe ends up where he started, we have travelled a little way into unknown territory. I recommend the journey to those with strong stomachs.
Lack of space last week prevented me from wr:ting about Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (' AA' Bloomsbury). Since then enough praise has been lavished upon it to make my own warm advocacy superfluous. Neither it nor The Salamander (' AA' Academy One) is a masterpiece, as some critics have claimed, but both are well worth going to see.
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