Just a few thoughts on Bergman’s Shame.

I see the film as having two main tentpoles that support it: The impact of a major crisis in the
psyche and, particularly, in human relationships, and the incongruence of war in the western,
Christianized world.

To express the first notion the film focuses on Jan’s and Eva’s relationship. At the beginning of the
film we see that the roles in the relationship are actually reversed: Jan appears as a feminine man
and Eva as a masculine woman. We see him hiding to cry and her reproaching his unmanly
behavior; later on she’ll be the one guiding him through the escape form the bombardments and
the military troops, and even later it will be her who has to bring food to the table by selling her
body to Jacobi. But as the film progresses, and particularly after shooting Jacobi, Jan’s behavior
changes completely. The roles are reversed again. In fact, he acquires so much masculinity that he
becomes positively violent and insensitive (the nature of both masculinity and femininity are
essential themes of the film; in fact it could be argued that Bergman’s intention was to show the
former’s essential participation in the mindset that a war is based upon), and she withdraws into
herself and takes an entirely passive attitude, allowing him to guide her to the boat that will leave
the island.

The second notion I believe is depicted mainly by Eva’s last line, also the last line of the film. In
what’s one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the history of filmmaking, she narrates a dream
she just had in which a garden of roses is burned to the ground with napalm. And she says that all
through the dream she had the feeling of having forgotten something “that someone had once
said.” I believe this is Bergman’s way of describing war as a concept essentially contrasting with a
world in which Christianity, a religion that’s supposedly based on mutual love, is widespread. He’d
be pointing at the hypocrisy of calling ourselves Christians, or Christian countries, while still waging
war upon each other. Christians seem to have forgotten the words of their Savior. I believe that
the sudden Dark Ages look that the film acquires towards the end is a further commentary on this
notion: for all of our technical and social advances, we still live in the Middle Ages.