Ordet
CARL THEODOR DREYER, 1955
1 STAR OUT OF 5
What’s a heathen to do with Ordet? While my conclusion is simple, and I came to it simply, I’ve thought a good deal about this work. Viewing the film was a relative breeze, another Dreyer work connected to the stage, with minimalist settings and terrific editing-in-scene that draw you toward the characters and their battles with and of faith. While I get the attraction, I’m reading things about it being “the summit of mise-en-scene”, while Roger Ebert said he couldn’t sleep after watching it, that it had “found its way into my soul,” and I find the hyperbole misplaced. There are a lot of works of cinema that leave me entranced, that I have a hard time getting off of my mind. After I’m done shotgunning the 100 greatest films per Sight & Sound, I want to get back to my favorites and watch them spread far, far apart, because once one would infect me with its vision and humanity, I’d be starting the next. But I can name them quite quickly to you: The Spirit of the Beehive, Fanny & Alexander, Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day, and Pather Panchali. Oh, and Play Time, especially if the day or week or month had not been going as planned. Also, the theater being closed has killed me because that’s where I really feel the religious experience of seeing a divine picture on screen. Last year, I saw Tigers Are Not Afraid twice at FilmBar, and twice I was left misty eyed with my fist pumping (the BEST reaction to have toward a film), and twice I was walking out of a theater with someone different totally going off about all we had seen in Parasite (just about as good). Ordet gives me absolutely no feeling that the best home rental let alone the best theater experience can give me, not even if it didn’t have that ending that had me rolling my eyes ‘til the final music cut out and I was back on the Criterion page for the film. It was good until then, but my goodness, it didn’t have me standing on my chair praising the smoggy respiratory hazard that is Phoenix sky that such a gift had fallen into my lap. But cheers to you, if it did. We all have to have the works we love. I just don’t get it.
This film deals with people with different degrees of faith. For the Borgens on the bountiful farm, it is perhaps that they glorify God through their life, prosperity and relations, while the Petersens hold a more Puritanistic fire and brimstone version of religious faith. The outlier, of course, is Johannes Borgen, who has the delusion that he is Jesus, but also Mikkel Borgen, who is a nonbeliever. No one in the film believes in the possibility of miracles, not even the new pastor in town, except Johannes and his youngest niece, whom he’s convinced of, at minimum, his ability to bring her mother back to life after she’s died. Now let’s say that there was a Jesus who was born, died, rose, and ascended into heaven: Would he be different than Johannes? I mean, how would you truly identify the veracity of his claims without the miracles? I think this is where the test of faith comes for the Borgen and Petersen heads of house with their petty battles over two sides of the same coin, as neither of them seem to have the fullest conviction of their faith to follow it to its most extreme ends that include subverting the whole natural order at the whim of the one true God. They do bury the hatchet and agree to marry their children at the funeral of Mikkel’s wife Inger’s funeral, so it is the winning of the human spirit that should get a little credit for some of the good of this film, even if the understanding had to come at so great a cost. Then, of course, a miracle is performed at the end, and Inger, who died in child birth, is resurrected after Johannes points out to everyone that they mourned her death without thinking to ask God for her life. Of course, Mikkel comes to believe, and we end with her being told her son, who died at birth, is with God. Hence, lukewarm faith and implicit reliance and belief on a natural order as opposed to a spiritual order aren’t enough. You have to go the whole damn way. At least that’s what I get out of Dreyer’s supposed challenge to faith. It does explore the quality of true faith in a highly dedicated and singular way.
I just don’t know how I, as a nonbeliever, can get much out of this film thematically, given that it’s addressing the fabric of faith, as opposed to, say, the moral teachings of Jesus. The former I have so little thought to give because I don’t have anything like religious faith; the latter can be quite interesting, and I don’t mind discussing it even if I don’t believe it came from a divine place, but that we created the divine place and inserted some pretty good ideas (and yes, some pretty horrible ones) into the belief system. The actual portrayal of a miracle actually draws me out of any spell the film would have cast on me and reminds me specifically that I’m watching a film, almost like breaking the fourth wall. Kiarostami could hardly have been more subtle with his conclusion of Taste of Cherry. But somehow, I don’t think that’s the point of Ordet. And whether it’s a spectacular work of mise-en-scene, a brilliant adaptation of the stage to the screen, or a compelling commentary on the quality of faith, it all comes down to that miracle at the end for me. I dreaded it. I sort of knew it was coming, and I said, for all that is good, please no! And Inger rose, and I threw in the towel.