The Rite

 

Ingmar Bergman's The Rite, from 1969. is a paranoid short film produced for television. This little seen chamber drama has just nine scenes and is performed on minimalist sets. A magistrate (Erik Hell) in an unnamed country investigates a trio of actors ( Bergman stalwarts Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and Anders Ek) on charges of indecency. The majority of the film consists of the magistrate interviewing the trio of actors individually. The banal and awkward judge tries to browbeat and bully the thespians. They are a shaky troupe in the last gasps of a menage a trois in which Ek and Thulin's characters have been cuckolding Bjornstrand's older husband. He is less volatile than his compatriots and knows he is the glue holding the company together, but he is weary of his burden. The trio unite to perform the indecent piece, a Dionysian fertility rite that demands a sacrifice. Eternal art triumphs over the transient power of the state much as in Bergman's The Magician. As one character puts it, "lilies will shoot up out of the asses of carcasses."

The film is very much in the God is dead and modern man is going to pieces mode that had been Bergman's default since at least Through a Glass Darkly. Hell is other people and human dynamics revolves around power struggles between creatures who may be half mad. Bergman himself appears as a dimly viewed priest in a confessional and provides no comfort for the supplicant or the viewer. The magistrate brings up the actors' personal life and financial dealings, a Kafkaesque portent of Bergman's future troubles with Swedish authorities. Sven Nykvist's black and white cinematography is stark and bracing. Enormous close-ups provide the appropriate sense of claustrophobia and spiritual nausea. The compactness of the film's structure saves it from edging into the miasma of morbid psychology displayed in such half cocked features from this era as Hour of the Wolf and The Passion of Anna, but what do I know, I also think Cries and Whispers is subpar Ingmar. What keeps this recovering Bergmaniac coming back to the man's work is his mastery with actors. All four main actors are superb, none more so than Ms. Thulin who artfully balances her character's sensuality, neuroses, and neediness.