MOVIE CHRONICLE
235
Ingmar Bergman, who was also a slow starter with American audiences,
has definitely caught on ; why not Ray?
Bergman is sensual and erotic; he provides "stark" beauty and
exposed nerves and conventional dramatic conflicts and a theme that
passes for contemporary-the coldness of intellectuals. Husbands fail
their wives and drive them crazy because they don't understand them
and all that. (Really, it's not people who don't understand us who
drive us nuts-it's when those who shouldn't,
do.)
But I would guess
that what gives his movies their immense appeal is their semi-intellectual,
or, to be more rude, "metaphysical" content. His characters are like
schoolboys who have just he'ard the startling new idea that "God is
dead"; this sets them off on torments of deep thought. Even his best
"dark" films, like
The Seventh Seal,
remind one of the nightmares of
life and death and religion that one had as a child; the sense of
mystery and the questions that no-one will answer suggest the way
religious symbols function in childhood and in fear. Bergman's power
over audiences is that he has not developed philosophically beyond the
awesome questions: audiences trained in more rational philosophy still
respond emotionally to Bergman's kind of mysticism, his searching
for "the meaning of life," his fatalism, and the 'archaic ogres of child–
hood and religion. People come out of his movies with "something to
think about" or, at least, to talk about.
Those who find Bergman profound and sophisticated (as
if
the artist who could move them deeply had to be a deep thinker)
are very likely to find Satyajit Ray rather too simple. I think that Ray,
like Kurosawa, is one of the great new film masters, and that his
simplicity is a simplicity arrived at, achieved, a master's distillation from
his experience; but it is-and this may be another reason why audiences
prefer Bergman-the simplicity to which we must respond with
feeling.
It is not the simplicity of a film like
David and Lisa-which
is that of
those who don't perceive complexities and have not yet begun to
explore their medium.
David and Lisa
is simplicity at a pre-art level.
People say that
Da1v'id and Lisa
is a "heartfelt" experience, but they
gobble it up so easily because it appeals to feelings they already had.
It's a movie about mental disturbances that couldn't disturb anybody.
Similarly,
Sundays and Cybele,
also a phenomenal box-office success, is
gobbled up as "artistic" (it's "artistic" the same way that
Harpers
Bazaar
fiction is "beautifully literate"). Bosley Crowther says that
Sundays and Cybele
is "what
Lolita
might conceivably have been had it
been made by a poet and angled to be a rhapsodic song of innocence
and not a smirking joke." Surely only a satirist like Nabokov could
