Shame (Special Edition)

It is from a structuralist perspective, however, that the film proves to be a truly remarkable work. It is clearly allegorical, and like all allegories it invites interpretation. It suggests many things, all conflictual: the struggle of art against political and social brutishness (the broken violin, the ruined hands, the smashing of a piano, etc.) It suggests the defeat of simplicity (with an overtone of 'simple piety') in the face of human complexity, and ultimately free will. Jan and Eva are not simple people, yet they attempt the simple life as an escape from war. The war - the human condition in extremis - catches up with them and takes them over through death, prostitution, revenge. The film's most poignant moment occurs as the aspiring mother, Eva, comes across a slaughtered infant, mourns the death of innocence, as it were.

There are many other allegorical levels at which this film plays, all of them valid interpretations.

Yet it is as an allegory of love that the film held greatest power for me. It's hardly an uplifting view of love, but then Bergman never shies from the harsher portrayals of humanity. The film is structured as a mirror turning upon itself. At the begining, Jan is weak, Eva acts. Jan has a dream, which reflects his inner turmoil and fear, Eva listens less than attentively as she tries to get them to meet an appointment with a ferry boat. When Jan does attempt to act (by fixing the radio, fixing the car, shooting a chicken) he fails miserably. She, on the other hand, strides out into a river to procure a fish from her neighbor, she cooks, she provides.

By the end of the film, it is Jan who is acting, Eva who follows. Jan takes revenge, Jan kills for boots, Jan bribes his way onto a boat, Jan steers. The greater Jan's power to act, the weaker and more dependent Eva becomes.

I am reminded of Sartre's reflections on human relationships (etres pour autrui) where intimacy is portrayed largely as a struggle between two beings for dominance.

What is most powerful about Bergman's allegory here is the context in which this struggle takes place. Eva's hegemony is one driven by the urge to nurture, provide and give. Her great desire is to have a child, to give and nourish life, an urge which she admits is instinctual. In Bergman's perverted mirror, Jan is transformed into action by the destructive forces of war. He takes life. At the end, wantonly. Eva's hegemony ends in the symbol of the dead child. Jan's in the unforgettable image of the dead floating soldiers.

Love, in Bergman's allegory then, becomes symbolically a struggle between life affirming forces and death. If the latter overcomes the former, neither prevails.


Pure genius   January 5, 2001
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

I can hardly imagine a more bleak film, yet it is absolutely riveting to watch and there is something transcendent in the experience of seeing it. As always, the performances are pitch perfect and the black & white medium ideal. Scenes of horror and emotional brutality are then punctuated by moments of incredible beauty, humanity and redemption, but utlimately we watch two individuals and society as a whole disintegrate. Bergman is reacting to many things here--including his and his nation's own mixed feelings of neutrality and complicity during WWII. Yes, it's an anti-war fim, but it's much more. Along with the earlier "Persona," "Hour of the Wolf" and the later "Passion of Anna," Bergman examines the awesome task of maintaining the integrity of our selves.


Bergman's Brilliant Examination of War   January 30, 1999
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

Along with "Persona" (1966), "Shame" ranks as one of Bergman's greatest achievements and remains as relevant and frightening as it was in 1968. While "Persona" dealt with the interior fragmentation of individual identity, "Shame" extends the dissolution to civilization as a whole. It stars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann as concert violinists who wish only to live undisturbed while a civil war rages around them. Inevitably, the war absorbs their lives and forces out many hidden and unappealing features in their characters. Bergman does an extraordinary job portraying a society collapsing into terror and oppression - an all the more impressive achievement when you realize that most of his films are intense character examinations featuring a few actors and are not staged on such a wide a scope as this.

The performances are all first-rate, as you would expect, and it presents - along with "Persona" - a probling presentation of key contemporary problems and, like the former film, permits the possibility that their are no fixed answers. The fate of Sydow and Ullmann's characters are left uncertain and the outcome of the war, as well as the combatants, are never specified - the viewer is never given easy point to orient himself; everything is unknowable, elusive, destructive. There is no salvation for these careers, no "Schindler's List" (a film that would make any interesting companion to this one) to save them from these horrors.

"Shame" is one of the best films ever made about ordinary people reacting to the horror of war. Bergman has synthesized many of his thematic concerns - about alienation, the collapse of any fixed certainty in a godless world - into a startingly lucid presentation of a civilization falling apart at the seams. He has here created two back-to-back films which practically sum up the twentieth-century experience for Western man. "Shame" is a flawless masterpiece.


Masterpiece   November 1, 2000
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

How can I add to the comments above. They are all valid. Watching SHAME for me was as close to a real experience of war as possible. No other war film has had this effect on be except for Jansco's THE RED & THE WHITE.

The yellow subtitles are distracting. Turn off your colour and you will find the white subtitles just as easy to read.