Winter Light.(Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light)

One night in Oxford, in the winter of 1970, a friend dropped by my room to see if I wanted to take in a movie. Rob was English, some years younger than I, nearing his last term. I was twenty-five, but only a second-year undergraduate, playing catch-up after four years in the Army and another at loose ends. We weren't close friends, but we sometimes hit a flick together or went to the pub to drink and try to meet girls--not so easy in those days, when Oxford was overwhelmingly male, and those males all pretty desperate. Rob, witty and easygoing, had the advantage of seeming not to be desperate. But mostly we struck out, and spent our time drinking and joking around. When we talked about ideas, we treated them dispassionately, donnishly, as if they were moves in a game of chess.

So what was on offer that night? Nothing of interest but a Bergman film, "Winter Light," showing at a local church. I wasn't a churchgoer, nor was Rob, but neither of us had seen the movie, and, after all, it was Bergman, and free, so we went.

The church was cold. There couldn't have been more than twenty-five, thirty of us scattered around the pews in our overcoats and scarves. The minister, a rugged-looking man with a Northern accent, stood before the screen and welcomed us, said he looked forward to the discussion that would follow the film. He was direct and plain in his speech, without a trace of the fluty, elevated manner my English friends so loved to parody in their High Church chaplains. Before taking his seat, he bowed his head and asked us to join him in prayer. Rob and I exchanged arch glances: so this wasn't quite free.

After the first scoffing murmurs of recognition--the opening scenes of the film show a cold-looking church with a few parishioners in overcoats--we all settled down. You simply cannot be ironical in the face of this movie, its adamant seriousness, the unguarded, naked urgency of its story, and the challenge it presents both to believers and to skeptics to assess the depth and consequences of their convictions.

Tomas, a Lutheran pastor and widower, is suffering a crisis of faith, barely going through the motions of his ministry; indeed, he can't even find the heart to treat his lover, a schoolteacher, with kindness. One of his parishioners has become obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. At his wife's urging, this man, a fisherman, comes to the pastor for reassurance, some blessed word of hope that he can grasp as a lifeline, but Tomas can offer nothing but the bleakness of his own despair. The fisherman commits suicide. Yet Bergman takes care to show that Tomas and the fisherman are not alone in their suffering, and that others, equally afflicted--the fisherman's wife, the pastor's steadfast lover, his hunchbacked assistant--are able to bear their pain into a still deeper faith and capacity for love.

It is a harrowing experience, this film, ...