Review of The Virgin Spring

Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) is, despite its winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1961, one of his lesser outings. Part of this is, no doubt, due to the fact that the bulk of the film was not written by Bergman, but by novelist Ulla Isaksson, who based her thin script upon a medieval ballad called Töre's Daughter At Vänge. The title of the film is a double entendre which refers to the chaste lead character's outing during the springtime, and a rivulet of water that emerges from where her corpse is eventually found by her family after she is raped and murdered. Compared to the films which preceded it, it lacks the emotional heft of The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, and compared to the films that followed it, it lacks the filmic daring of Persona or A Passion. It is an odd film in the Bergman canon, and ranks with Cries And Whispers and The Serpent's Egg as one of the few filmic mediocrities the director ever crafted. Its characters are wooden, almost unintendedly comic, their motivations and reactions are wholly stilted and artificial, and the symbolism is often heavyhanded. Fortunately, it's only an hour and a half in length. It's little wonder that only a dozen or so years later horror filmmaker Wes Craven (and Sean Cunningham) would launch his forgettable career with a film heavily influenced by, if not flat out based upon, it, called Last House On The Left…. Yet, the reason why this film fails to live up to the high standards of most Bergman films- although, by contrast, it's still worlds better than 99.9% of the Hollywood crap churned out today, all boils down to that most important, yet overlooked, reason why all films fail or succeed, and that's because, despite being a visual medium, a film must be well written, with well developed characters and a scenario that can emotionally affect a viewer, be that in the archetypal or realistic vein, to succeed artistically. This film never gets off the stylistic fence and decides whether it is a realistic film nor a symbolic allegory. Thus it fails on both scores, and the bulk of the blame for that can be laid upon the pro-Christian leaning script of the novelist Ulla Isaksson, who wrote an earlier Bergman film, So Close To Life, a few years before. While there is no comparing Wes Craven's 1972 filmic spin on this theme, Last House On The Left, in any cinematic nor artistic terms to The Virgin Spring, in one odd way, Craven's later film does seem more relevant, for it never attempts to find reasons for, nor make sense of, its anomic violence, thus it cannot fail, on that level. Bergman's film asks the big questions, and when its own silence bellows forth no answers, its hollowness only too easily engulfs its own inquisitions, which displays flaws the lesser film could only dream to be vilified for.