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Ordet
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| Year: |
1955
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Director: |
Carl Theodor Dreyer
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| Stars: |
Emil Hass Christensen, Henrik Malberg, Cay Kristiansen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Birgitte Federspiel, Ejner Federspiel, Gerda Nielsen, Sylvia Eckhausen, Ove Rud, Henry Skjær, Hanne Agesen, Susanne Rud, Edith Trane, Ann Elisabeth Groth
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| Genre: |
Drama |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) is on the dunes again. He's never been the same since he absorbed himself in Christian teachings, as his father Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg) hoped he would become a priest, but Johannes became so wrapped up in his learning that he lost his mind and now believes he is Jesus Christ, having the tendency to wander off into the countryside surrounding the house he shares with his family and preach to the world in general, none of whom are present to hear his sermons. Morten's faith as a result has fallen away, but soon he will find it tested, as they all will.
Carl Theodor Dreyer was never one to shy away from the big questions about life, faith and belief, and for many his adaptation of Kaj Munk's celebrated religious play was his finest achievement, getting to the heart of its issues in a moving and profound fashion. But it asked a lot of its audience, not least falling back on pitilessly stagy incarnations of the God moving in a mysterious way convention which saw its final scene controversially depicting Him intervening on a family's grief which could wrap up thoughts of His benevolence quite nicely, except if you started to chew it over you may well find more questions raised, and not warm and cosy ones either.
Before we reach that point, we have to be introduced to the family and the dilemmas which they are facing. First up, there's what to do about Johannes, though his father and his two brothers, eldest Mikkel (Emil Hass Christiensen) and the youngest Anders (Cay Kristiansen), appear to have given up hoping for some recovery: if it happens, it happens, but they're not holding their breath. Mikkel is the father to two young daughters, but has another baby on the way with his beatific wife Inger (Birgitte Federspiel); thanks to seeing his brother go mad from Christianity, he's allowed his faith to lapse and is now an agnostic, even an atheist, while his father sympathises but remains a believer.
Then there's Anders, who wishes to marry the daughter of Petersen (Ejner Federspiel), the local tailor who is a member of a devout, cultish faction of Christianity and outright dismisses any chance of a union because he doesn't think Anders and his father are pious enough. This character offers much food for thought as he appears to represent a grimmer side of the religion which is so obsessed with receiving their reward in heaven that they utterly neglect to be decent to their fellow human beings while alive on Earth. Thus the organised aspect is seen to ignore what should be allowing the living to appreciate the best of what they have, and by implication what God has given them, by sternly rejecting anything but yearning for the afterlife, a point of view which leads Morten to come to blows with Petersen.
Fair enough, but then events take a problematic turn when Inger goes into labour and sees her life slipping away. It all goes horribly wrong for the Borgens as if to say, what do you know, Petersen was right all along and you should have been preparing for the worst; this is of course a complex topic, for bad things happen to good people all the time, and blaming God for them is not the done thing in religion, but nevertheless that's what Dreyer appears to be edging towards in regard to this formerly happy (apart from Johannes) family. Certainly the original writer Munk had good reason to be angry with the Almighty, as he was murdered by the Gestapo during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark, but then there's that manner in which this is resolved, with one of those miracles Petersen has been insisting on and suddenly has the sceptical Mikkel giving praise. The question remains: why did God make these perfectly good people suffer so much in the first place when he was going to take it back? And not all of it, because the baby is still dead? The lack of a solid resolution leaves one uneasy.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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