Film at eight

[lsanderson]

A Solitary Ingmar Bergman on Life, Love and Death, in Documentary Style
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

“Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven’t thought about death,” Ingmar Bergman muses in the extended interview that forms the spine of “Bergman Island,” an extraordinarily revealing documentary portrait of this Swedish director at his home on the desolate Baltic Island of Faro.

His lifelong terror of it diminished, he says, after anesthesia for surgery rendered him unconscious for several hours. If this is what death is like, he says he remembers thinking afterward, it is nothing to be afraid of. Until then he harbored “an insane fear” of it that was channeled into his film “The Seventh Seal.” The image of a knight playing chess with death in that film came from a painting in a church he visited with his father in Uppland.

Since his recovery from surgery, he says, his fear has undergone further modification. Because he acutely senses the presence on the island of Ingrid Karlebo, the last of his five wives, who died in 1995 after 23 years of marriage, he is certain that she is present and that his lack of consciousness under anesthesia was merely a “chemical reaction,” an “artificial death.” When he dies, he now believes, he may actually be reunited with her.

For those Bergman admirers to whom he looms as a magisterial artistic sentinel gazing grimly into eternity, his words hold out some comfort. As for the existence of God, he believes that intimations of divinity can be found in the classical music with which he surrounds himself and in what he calls “human holiness.”

Mr. Bergman recalls first visiting the island in 1960 to make “Through a Glass Darkly,” and it is also where five more films, including “Persona,” were shot. Since moving there in January 2004, he says, he sometimes goes for days without speaking to anyone. He says he plans to stay for the rest of his days. More

Yes, Soldiers of France, in All but Name
By A. O. SCOTT

“Days of Glory,” the English title of Rachid Bouchareb’s new film — called “Indigènes,” or natives, in French — has a rousing, somewhat generic war-movie ring. And Mr. Bouchareb, a French director of Algerian descent who has made four previous features, sticks close to the conventions of the genre as he follows a small group of World War II infantrymen from North Africa through Italy and across France into Alsace. His combat sequences are filmed with exquisite precision and edited with admirable economy, and the quieter moments that allow the characters of the men to emerge find a perfect balance between dramatic impact and psychological authenticity.

In many ways “Days of Glory,” Algeria’s official Oscar submission for best foreign language film, fits comfortably into a proud and apparently inexhaustible cinematic tradition. It is a chronicle of courage and sacrifice, of danger and solidarity, of heroism and futility, told with power, grace and feeling and brought alive by first-rate acting. A damn good war movie.

What makes “Days of Glory” something more — something close to a great movie — is that it finds a new and politically urgent story to tell in the well-trodden (and beautifully photographed) soil of wartime Europe. That English title also evokes the opening lines of “La Marseillaise,” which announce that the day of martial glory has arrived for “the children of the fatherland.” More

The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch
By MANOHLA DARGIS

There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace. Over the last three decades these wild things have laid siege to us even as they have mutated: the deformed baby of “Eraserhead” evolving into the anguished distortions of “The Elephant Man,” the Reagan-era surrealism of “Blue Velvet,” the serial home invasion in “Twin Peaks” and the meta-cinematic masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” a dispatch from that smog-choked boulevard of broken dreams called Hollywood.

Mr. Lynch revisits that bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits — which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden’s apartment, as redesigned by Edward Hopper — have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both.

As the Good Witch of the North says, it’s always best to start at the beginning and, so, once upon a time, an actress, Nikki Grace (a dazzling, fearless Laura Dern), receives a stranger (Grace Zabriskie, hilarious, unsettling) into her home. The unnamed visitor, a new neighbor with bulging eyes and an East European accent, engages in some gossip (“I hear you have a new role”) before delivering two brief parables that hint at the weirdness to follow. When the boy went out into the world to play, the stranger says, evil was born and followed the boy. When the girl went out to play, though, she got lost in the marketplace, which pretty much sums up what happens to most pretty actresses in Hollywood. More