The beauty and strangeness of Bergman's Winter Light

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1962) is dark and depressing even for Bergman, which says a lot; it's not a movie for everyone - there's not a moment of humor or levity, and the action is subdued and cerebral to say the least - but it's a beautiful movie to watch and it's a serious, thoughtful depiction of a man in the midst of crisis. In short, the film is about a pastor in a small Swedish village in winter, and there's not much more depressing than that: everything looks cold and isolated, the church is sparsely attended, everyone's bundled against the cold, even indoors, and the priest (Gunnar Bjornson) is suffering from a cold or the flu as he conducts his service with slow, deliberate grace. After the service the priest councils a parishioner, Max von Sydow, who is depressed and morose, worried about the fate of the world (a nuclear attack from China, of all things). The priest's words ring hollow, and shortly after their discussion the man shoots himself to death. Meanwhile, the village "schoolmarm" throws herself upon the priest - they have apparently conducted an affair for about 2 years - but he pushes her away. We learn that he's been widowed for 4 years and still mourns his late wife. Most of all, he's at a crisis of faith, he believes his life has meant nothing, and he has the hubris to ask why his god has forsaken him - seeing himself as in Christ's image. Later, he visits the schoolmarm in her home, which she shares w/ an elderly aunt (and w/ a room that serves as the schoolhouse); there, he tells her that she repulses him, he doesn't love her and never has, tells her to leave him alone - a brutal scene - after which he visits the wife of the dead man and offers no kind words of consolation and then goes to another even smaller church where he is to lead an afternoon service. In this church, the rector, a chatty fellow, talks to the priest about his interpretation of the death of Jesus, and his view, humble and sincere, is that the greatest pain that Jesus felt was his apparent abandonment by God, his father. This insight leads the priest to think, even for a moment, that it would be a worse sin to think that God has abandoned him - there's a glimmer of hope, at the end, that the priest will go on with his calling as he begins the service, in the nearly deserted church. Worth watching? Yes, though it's not "cinematic" by any contemporary standard, the lighting and photography by the great Sven Nyquist is fantastic: beautiful well-lit closeups, mysterious use of interior details (the crude statute of Jesus, the bathroom keys in the schoolroom) and external detail (the horse approaching the car as the priest sets out for the afternoon service); yes, there are continuity issues (disappearing snow) that are kind of funny, unintentionally. You have to think of this as an interior drama, a place that Bergman established for cinema and that is seldom examined today - he's obviously in the Swedish dramatic, rather than cinematic, tradition here. Winter Light was the 2nd in a trilogy, all of which examine issues of crises of faith and mental illness/depression/delusion (Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence).