SHAME (SKAMMEN) Milestones

“History is a nightmare from which I cannot awake,” wrote James Joyce. Bergman dramatizes that idea unforgettably in SHAME.

Liv Ullman wakes up to a roar of rockets that sound like they’re emanating from an endless newscast inside her head . Her meek husband (Max Von Sydow) is far less capable than she of handling the world war brewing all around them-at first. Early on, he curls in a fetal ball, like a child hiding from a parental quarrel, but later, his spirit crushed as armies bloodily invade, he turns cold-blooded, a “leader” now that his world is dying or dead.

As in a dream, as in most of Bergman’s masterworks, the more truthful a story seems, the more mysteriously it pushes into the realm of dream-logic, into vistas and transformations that are terrifying, pure, and unprotected by the cinematic convention of a hero who falls asleep.