I suppose when you're happy doing your own thing and you've generally created spiritually enriching films, according to improvised guidelines which imaginatively mutated over time, it may at some point occur to you to direct the saddest most despondent film ever conceived, to make a distressing point cloaked in sheer austere lugubrity.
Pushing things past the strictly solemn to approach rarefied uncompromised misery, Ingmar Bergman's Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light) distills utter complete hopelessness.
It's unfortunate to shyly say that the lack of hope is derived from honesty, from a pressurized irreconcilable desire to share one's thoughts with imposing candour.
Does such a truthful need reflect genuine social lucidity, inasmuch as the ability to freely express oneself is oft admired and sincerely celebrated?
Is the sharing of doubts and misgivings not encouraged by different cultures, to avoid pent up obtuse hardheartedness followed by shocking emotional explosions?
In Nattvardsgästerna, the individual under examination occupies a prominent position however, and people look to him for strength in difficult times of spiritual stress.
When he makes his own lack of faith apparent and expresses it with candid levity, the results are completely disastrous for his diminutive humble flock.
He attempts to ease troubled minds by modestly employing frank concern, but misjudges tortured temperaments who were seeking guidance not familiarity.
The cultivation of ideals thus receives distraught import, through morose unrestrained melancholia blindly abandoning its lofty discourse.
It's an extreme example sheltered in woebegone obfuscation, utilizing provocative misjudgment to comment upon mortality.
If you could approach every social interaction like a French judge interpreting the Civil Code, socially, not judicially, each interaction adapted to specific circumstances, then perhaps through lauded perspicuity you could efficiently prescribe communal medication (one case at a time).
Populism has wildly challenged the establishment of wise decision making however, through realistic democratic loopholes which instinctually bewilder.
Those occupying positions of power must proceed confidently nevertheless.
As alternative rationalities clash and codify.
A bleak film.
Disposed noblesse.
