‘WINTER LIGHT’ (Ingmar Bergman)

In the black and white starkness, find the gray truths.

Somewhere in a small Swedish town, a pastor, Tomas, grapples with his own issues with God, even as he goes through the paces of everyday ‘preach and pray’. He also grapples with personal life issues, a woman, Marta, who is in love with him, and wants him to marry her. His wife is dead, the one whom he loved, and though he does not want Marta’s love, and pushes her away, she hangs on, saying that God (she prayed to God in anger, though she is a non-believer) wants her to love Tomas and show him compassion, since he hates himself. “You’ll hate yourself to death,” she says. Tomas, who is also with cough and fever, asks her to shut up.

Certain other elements surface in the movie, so intricate in its simplicity.

Jonas Persson is one of the parish people with a wife and three kids and one on the way, who is undergoing mental anguish because he has read that the Chinese are prepared for any kind of war, have nuclear weapons etc. In other words, we go through our everyday lives, but there is pain, suffering and aggression which is a part of the larger world. Jonas is unable to come to terms with this, and comes to Tomas for help. Tomas, however, unleashes his own doubts about God, his own insecurities, onto Jonas. He tells Jonas of how he nurtured close to him a God whom he thought to be merciful and loving, when all around him he saw the destruction waged during the Spanish Civil War. He watched suffering, and did not dare to think that this was possible in God’s world. He tells Jonas that, “suffering is incomprehensible, so it needs no explanations,” except that there is no creator, and no design to life.

The realization, through his rantings to Jonas, that there is no God, frees him finally, but also destroys him. Jonas, who has come to Tomas for help, walks away in disgust, and is found with a bullet hole in his head soon after. He has committed suicide.

Algot, a disabled church help, who has been asked by Tomas to read the Gospel to deal with his pain, says that he has been doing so. He argues that Jesus’ physical pain must have been bearable, but he must have been unable to deal with the pain of betrayal by his God when he cries out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ This is actually a statement that echoes what Tomas is undergoing. The movie does go on to say that Tomas loved his wife deeply, and that perhaps the only redeeming fact about life is the ability to love. But Tomas’ wife is dead, and he feels forsaken here as well.

At the end, Tomas takes Marta with him to the afternoon service, where she is encouraged by the piano player to leave this place haunted by death and hopelessness, but she stays on. She says in utter despair, “If only we could believe.” This actually sums up the essence of the movie.

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