Sin’s Heavy Heel

That Liv Ullmann’s magnificent film version of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter has had difficulty finding a distributor in this country is a depressing sign of the sorry state of contemporary cinema that is available to us.

Ullmann, who also wrote the screenplay based on the first book of Undset’s trilogy, is very successful in capturing the atmosphere of Catholic faith that must have pervaded the early part of the fourteenth century in Norway.

Kristin Lavransdatter is a profound two-and-a-half-hour cinematic dramatization of the mystery of love, all love—that between man and woman, husband and wife, parent and child, God and man.

Ullmann has accomplished with the tools of moviemaking what Undset accomplished with the written word: the depiction of characters living out a drama under the loving gaze of God.

Though her background is Lutheran rather than Catholic, Ullmann in her film reveals what some philosophers and theologians have called the Catholic analogical imagination—an imagination that stresses the immanence of God in the world, the presence of God in nature and people and art as well as in sacraments.

Having filmed Ullmann in several Ingmar Bergman classics, Sven Nykvist, arguably the greatest cinematographer of the last forty years, worked with the distinguished actress behind the camera for Kristin. He captures on celluloid the breathtaking power of nature both in its sweeping seductiveness in gorgeous landscapes and breathtaking skies, and also at its most frightening and awesome in storms when it seems to dwarf its human inhabitants.

What Nykvist also has done with Ullmann is what he did in film after film with Bergman, namely have the camera suggest the state of characters’ souls. The terrain in Ullmann’s film is different from Bergman’s: Characters in Kristin are not alienated moderns adrift in a death-of-God culture but rather faith-filled wayfarers who, though they sin fiercely, never doubt that God’s love surrounds them. It is the presence of God’s love, seen as the background of all other loves—even those that are illicit—that makes Kristin Lavransdatter such a marvelous movie.

Several times in the movie Ullmann and Nykvist give close-up shots of characters’ faces that are so close that part of the face does not fit within the frame. The cumulative experience of this kind of camera work is that it prevents the viewers from distancing themselves from the story on the screen. The camera almost forces us to be involved in the drama.

Different scenes in this epic film will be especially appealing to different tastes. When Kristin (Elisabeth Matheson) begins to see the effects of her sin of fornication with Erlend (Bjorn Skagestad), she says solemnly that she had no idea how sin tramples others down. Those few seconds of cinema are a stunning example of profound moral insight in film.

In the final moments of the film, Kristin’s mother, Ragnfrid (Henny Moan), confesses to her husband, Lavrans (Sverre Anker Ousdal), her sin of fornication with another man just before their wedding. Lavrans, who had previously had been judgmental about others’ failings, forgives his wife, and we have a sense that he has reached a new level in his journey toward God.

Ullmann has stated that she has great love for performers, for the risks they take, for the way they courageously reveal their deepest selves to the audience. Ullmann’s affection for the performers is evident in the movie, but something else is also evident: Ullmann’s love for Undset’s characters and her story.

Author

  • Rev. Robert E. Lauder

    Rev. Robert E. Lauder is a Brooklyn diocesan priest and professor of philosophy at St. John's University, Jamaica, New York.

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