Gustaf Edgren’s Walpurgis Night
initially impresses for its social consciousness, starting with a newspaper
office discussion about Sweden’s declining birthrate, the participants splitting on whether the
causes are primarily social (in particular a housing shortage) or whether it’s
basically because of there being not enough love to go around. It rapidly becomes clear that
the film is staking itself on the latter, less rigorous theory, as it launches
into a bizarrely overstuffed and coincidence-strewn plot encompassing a raid on
an illegal abortion provider, a wicked blackmailer, a covered-up murder, and much
else; it even encompasses a scene in the French Foreign Legion (including the
execution of an attempted deserter). By the latter stages, the movie is racing
through key point developments (such as an apparent successful subsequent
desertion), as if randomly discarding as much weight as necessary to get a
rickety plane off the ground; still, this does somewhat contribute to a sense
of societal insecurity and anxiety. An interesting secondary aspect is the portrayal
of a society beset with people making a living by peddling opportunistic
photographs or stray bits of gossip to the newspapers, a practice presented
here as being amusingly harmless for the most part, but which speaks to the
censoriousness and societal hypocrisy explored in so many other Swedish films
(it’s typical of the film that while it makes much of the discovery of the abortion operation, it shows no interest in the plight of and
consequences for the women whose privacy was thereby breached). The movie may
most often be viewed now for the pre-Hollywood Ingrid Bergman, not that
interestingly cast here as a woman of almost cloying virtue. Victor Sjostrom
plays her father, with something of the pained gravity that would reach its
zenith years later in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, lurching between
treating his daughter as a latter-day saint and damning her as a common
trollop.
No comments:
Post a Comment