tormenting desires
by
Douglas Messerli
Ingmar
Bergman (screenplay), Alf Sjöberg (director) Hets (Torment) / 1944
In the very next scene, we see that
things are not much different for the seniors of this school, particularly in
the classroom of their Latin teacher, who they have nicknamed, with good
reason, “Caligula” (Stig Järrel), who torments them during their attempts to
translate Latin passages into Swedish, threatening and demeaning them upon even
slight infractions, and demanding immediate rote memory of Latin endings. Like
the teacher in the first scene, Caligula seems to delight in their petty errors
and his gratified by serious failures, awarding demerits.
Although neither the director nor the
screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, openly suggest any sexual reasons behind Caligula’s
torture of the boy, it is apparent that, as in the film’s first scene, there is
something perverse in the teacher’s obvious focus on Jan-Erik, certainly the
best-looking boy in the classroom; if his behavior isn’t a manifestation of a
sublimated sexual attraction, it is, nonetheless, possible that the ugly older
man is envious of young charge, and determined, for that very reason, to do him
in.
Throughout the film, moreover, Caligula
admits to others and the headmaster that he has recently been “sick,” implying
that his intolerance of his students has something to do with a recent illness
from which he has apparently not yet completely recovered. He never makes clear
what this illness might have been, but surely it must have a relationship to
his treatment of Jan-Erik.
When, soon after, we discover that the
sleazy teacher also has his eye on a young worker in the local tobacconist
shop, Bertha, we perceive that this “sickness” is even deeper that we might have
imagined. If he, at least, pushes Jan-Erik away from him or, more simply,
wishes to control him, his attempts to woe Bertha are far more nefarious and
disgusting.
Caligula, we soon discover, has been
following and, possibly, threatening Bertha for some time, leading her to drink.
When Jan-Erik, after
a night out with his classmate, discovers her
stumbling down a staircase, utterly drunk, he
kindly attempts to help her, discovering her address, and leading her to her
home.
Terrified that her mysterious stalker will
try to enter her apartment—even though she has changed the lock on her door—she
begs her underage savior to stay with her, not only depriving him of his needed
study time, but ultimately seducing him—in an act that today we would brand as
child-abuse—into her bed.
At least her “abuse” is of the pleasant
kind, and this young Werther—Jan-Erik imagines falling in love with one woman
for whom he will play his violin—quickly falls madly in love with her, abandoning
his studies to be in her presence.
If Caligula has long stalked her, with
Jan-Erik’s interest in Bertha he becomes even more compelled to torment the
woman—and, in his own version of child-abuse—his young male charge.
Although Jan-Erik calls the police,
accusing Caligula as having murdered Bertha, like all the adult beings in this
film, the police dismiss the boy’s assertions, finding that Bertha died of unknown
causes, freeing Caligula to not only slap Jan-Erik in front of the far gentler
headmaster (Olof Winnerstrand) but to demand the boy’s expulsion.
Evidently the original film ended
darkly, with few possibilities for the now societally ostracized Jan-Erik. Given
the criticisms of this first version, Sjöberg and Bergman added a final scene
when, after all the other students have graduated, the headmaster visits
Jan-Erik, now inhabiting Bertha’s old apartment, telling him that he will help
him to get back on track and find a new life.
Caligula arrives to seek forgiveness for
his behavior, but his former student turns from him, walking into the light,
now free from all the “educational” abuse that even the family doctor has described
as something closer to living in a concentration camp (a theme which is
underscored by a scene showing Caligula reading Dagposten, the Swedish Nazi newspaper).
For that last scene, Sjöberg was absent,
having other commitments, enabling the young Bergman—the man who would
eventually rise to take over Sjöberg’s position as the most noted of Swedish
directors—to direct his very first scene.
But this picture is still very much
Sjöberg’s film, with its intense use of deep blacks and luminescent whites,
along with the director’s fascination with winding and treacherous staircases—clearly
representing the terrifying paths these young students have daily to undertake in order to become adults—and the
many mirrored images which the children (and audience) perceive but seemingly
have little effect on the frozen-minded and visually blind adults. As in most
of this director’s film, Torment’s
theatricality is quite thrilling, reminding us that, if he was a great cinema
director (this film and his later Miss
Julie winning awards at Cannes), he had an even more notable career as a
stage director, producing throughout the 1930s-1960s some of the best of
Swedish and world theater.
Los Angeles,
April 17, 2017
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