Reviews of Thirst
Displaying all 3 reviews
Gary Wood
13Dec08
Swedish actress turned writer Birgit Tengroth’s short stories are converted to film by Ingmar Bergman to great effect.
After an opening title sequence reminiscent of Hitchcock, the film sews together tender, frail vignettes of men and women in and out of various psychosexual relationships that build upon one another to create a potent vision of passion, jealousy, and disillusionment.
Fans of both Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen will see a clear line of influence running from this early Bergman film to their most important works.
Case in point: I couldn’t help noticing a similarity between an early scene of the damaged ballet dancer Rut and her unstable husband Bertil in THIRST and a scene in Jarmusch’s MYSTERY TRAIN involving a young Japanese couple; she playfully pantomimes, as he broods. And of course Woody Allen’s more mature work like ANOTHER WOMAN and HUSBANDS AND WIVES are full-bodied testimonials.
The title alone, THIRST, foreshadows a seminal moment in Bergman’s use of symbolism in CRIES AND WHISPERS: the wrenching scene of Agnes awakening in pain, dying of thirst.
- Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
Stephen
10Dec08
I don’t think anyone does relationship films better than Bergman. The man shows such a deep understanding of it all in this one. Even his early films are filled with fantastic moments that make you wonder how he could do it that well at such a young age. It’s an intense movie but, like ‘Cries & Whispers’, ‘Scenes…’, etc., is worth seeing more than once. The whole Eclipse box of his is a must own in my opinion.
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
Neil Coombs
28Nov08
‘Thirst’ is one of Ingmar Bergman’s early works and it is quite a revelation to see how soon in his cinematic career he demonstrated a vital technical and emotional competence. The film is a dark study of relationships, centered around the memories of a dysfunctional married couple travelling in a hot, crowded train on a midsummer’s night. The film uses flashbacks and an elliptical narrative structure to unveil lives that appear to comprise a series of regrets and mistakes.
The film prefigures Bergman’s ‘Scenes From a Marriage’ (1973) in its unflinching study of the masochistic relationship between husband and wife. At one stage we are not sure if Birtil (Birger Malmsten) is about to murder his wife, Ruth (Eva Henning). In a brief Hitchcockian moment, he hides in the corridor of the screaming train in the shadows and billowing curtains of a Film Noir mist, waiting, as if to push her from a half-open door. A moment later, he dreams that he has clubbed her to death with a bottle.
‘Thirst’ also forehadows Bergman’s ‘The Silence’ (1963) in its depiction of a war-torn Europe: Partying Germans darken the train’s windows against the dereliction of civilisation that they have wrought; the silhouettes of shattered buildings pass by the windows as the faces of Europe’s starving are pressed against the glass. The affluent pass through this hell absorbed in their own petty emotional and spiritual dilemmas. As Bertil observes, some people just have to survive; morals and spirituality are an indulgence of the privileged.
The tangential strands of narrative explore Ruth and Birtil’s encounters with other partners and their repercussions. Viola (Birgit Tengroth) is abused by a bearded pseudo-psychiatrist who asks her to, “admit that your whole life has been one long mistake” – he also attempts to seduce her with the comic line “I’ll plough your virgin soil”, to which she replies, “You’ll not plough anything”. Her eventual suicide (driven by a rather suspect encounter with a predatory lesbian) is suggested through a few ripples on the surface of the water.
‘Thirst’ certainly equals much of Bergman’s later work in its powerfully affecting use of sound and cinematography and, as an introduction to Bergman, it has the advantage of being a work of consequence that is only 84 minutes long.