Citizens of CineDump, we stand at the brink of a new decade, and, darlings, things are grim. But instead of losing hair and sleepover Q-Anon, anti-vaxers, Coronavirus, and everything else threatening to make this the second dark(er) age, let’s focus on what brings us all together--and tears us apart.
That’s right--I’m talking about love, sweet love, but also, and perhaps more importantly, love, sick love. Deranged, obsessive, codependent, fucked-up, fucked-out, full metal, psycho-powered love.
Welcome to Amour Foubruary where I’ll be guiding you through three predictably grim, perfectly transcendent explorations of romance at its most torturously toxic. Kicking things off, I’d like to introduce you to my all time favorite horror movie, Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.
Get ready for the birth of mumble-gore, as Ingmar, everyone’s most beloved depressive, serves up an elegiac romance wrapped in a mental breakdown. Hour tells the story of the emotionally shattered artist, Johan (played by future Exorcist alum Max Von Sydow), and his devoted wife Alma (the transcendent Liv Ullman) as they escape the pressures of the world at their idyllic, but eerily deserted, summer cottage. What starts out as a tense evenings of Johan joking around, drawing Alma in poses that look more humiliating and painful than erotic or artistic, quickly becomes nights filled with paranoia, traumatically relived memories, and vivid hallucinations. Johan is a man on the run from so many demons, stopping even for a moment at their summer house is enough time for them to catch him, and every night, he finds himself staying awake, haunted by recollections of his abusive parents, possible homosexual entanglements, and the lost love of his life, a partly fictionalized, to-good-to-be-true vision of Feminity named Veronica. Through all this, Alma remains a constant presence at his side, even electing to stay awake with him so he’s not alone to face the “hour of the wolf” (4 o’clock, the Swedish version of 3 a.m., apparently), the time when the veil between worlds lift, when “the most people die, when the most babies are born.”
Alma bears Johan’s mental breakdown with masochistic devotion, comforting him, managing household finances, and trying her damnedest to help him hang on to his ever-loosening grasp on reality. But all her loving efforts are put to naught when a tribe of mysterious strangers show up one day, demanding she and Johan keep them company at a dinner party.
The outsiders, all black clad, sexually depraved aristocrats, are a delightfully twisted mixture of La Dolce Vita and Grey Gardens, a violently unhappy family living in a crumbling fortress, who instantly take a liking to Johan while ever-so-unsubtly letting Alma know that she’s less than welcome on this supposedly uninhabited island. As Johan begins to spend more time away from his wife and in the company of these ill-tempered libertines, he slips further into his delusions until Alma is forced to confront him and his newfound friends, with surreally tragic results.
Bergman threads the film with innumerable resonant, eerily poetic images. The first and most potent of which comes early in the film when Johan begs Alma to pose for him. She had been cuddled up to his side, the pair of them relaxing in the shade of their cutesy, Ikea-esque summer cottage, a Nordic Adam and Eve. It’s apparent that Alma is both happy to be asked to pose but reluctant to break the moment of tranquility, but Johan keeps playfully bothering her until she relents. Moving into a spotlight white patch of sun, Johan instructs Alma to twist herself into a strange looking pose that resembles an upright fetal position. Knotted up, legs pulled protectively against her body, Johan badgers her until she pulls down her dress, baring her shoulders in a way that reads more sub than sexy.
This image of Alma literally bowed before Johan is contrasted with Johan’s idealized dream woman, the vanished Veronica Vogler (sorry, guys, I’m an absolute slut for alliteration). Johan imagines (or, alternatively, the island projects her a la The Shining’s Overlook Hotel) on a rocky beach, where she appears like an angel, dressed in white, upright, regal, one breast exposed like a vision of the divine feminine in a Jungian textbook. This pair of images powerfully evokes the uneven dynamics in Johan’s and Alma’s relationship, his sometimes unintentionally sadistic craving for control and his simultaneous obsession with a woman who embodies complete dominance.
In the film’s second half, the imagery becomes triumphantly, claustrophobically surreal. When the aristocrats show up, making demands on the already overwhelmed couple, Bergman, whose camera work is usually brilliantly minimalist, heartbreakingly austere, lets a little freakiness out and treats his audience to some gorgeously staged strangeness. One of the most memorable shots in the film centers around a spinning camera, turning and turning and turning like a top around a massive dinner table as the phantom family bickers, gossips and backbites. Every shadow, every cruel smile, every anguished grimace is thrown into monstrous proportions, and it lasts, and lasts and lasts, disorienting the viewer and putting us psychically in Alma and Johan’s position.
One of the film’s tenderest moments comes as Johan, watching his exuberantly mean guests rip each other apart, seems to physically crumble. Alma intuits his distress and hugs him. The two standing, isolated, cloaked in shadow as the party rages around them, is a sharply poignant image. In that moment, there is so much unspoken history between the two characters, a depth of love and intimacy that the film regards with horror and suspicion.
Which brings me to the film’s ending. After Alma and Johan undergo a night of traumatic violence, Alma sits alone, talking to the camera in a very Bergman bit of formal fuckery. Mournfully, she attempts to give a coda on her relationship with Johan. She reflects that her love for Johan made her incapable of helping him. It pushed her too close to his madness, made her share in his delusions and nightmares. Like another Amour Foubruary film I’ll feature, The Shining, Bergman never confirms for the audience if the awful spectres are real ghosts or solely the product of the tortured minds trapped in a too-small space. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Alma realizes, awfully, tragically, one day too late, that all you need isn’t love, that love won’t keep us together, that love isn’t the bridge over troubled waters.
For Alma and anyone like her, the horror of Hour of the Wolf isn’t the phantasmagoria of body horror that develops late in the film, or the well-worn idea that malevolent ghosts stalk lonely places--it’s the realer, sadder realization that love is simply not enough. Alma loves Johan with complete, saintly self-abandon, relentlessly, passionately fighting for him, but Johan, lost in a sea of unresolved trauma, can’t be reached by love alone.
This all-time favorite movie reminds me of another amour foubulous quote from Southern Gothic queen Carson McCullers, “There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this...It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons.”
For every wounded soul, every lonely heart and codependent out there (you know who you are), go watch Hour of the Wolf however you can find it. This blurry, dizzying, phantasmagoric meditation on the dangers of loving too well will strip your heart and leave you lonely. But, as the film suggest, maybe that’s not the worst possible fate.
Pennie Sublime