I have mixed feelings about the ending – it does seem a little trite – but I think it’s very ambiguous, and at least potentially ironic. On the whole, after watching the film five or six times, I think it works pretty well. It’s certainly very typical of Bergman to end a film with a (potentially/seemingly) redemptive coda, a sort of ‘calm after the storm’ where the intensity dies down and we see things in a more level-headed way. The two most relevant connections to make here are with the endings of
Cries and Whispers,
where the dead Agnes’ diary entry about a peaceful afternoon with her sisters casts a potentially softening light on the dysfunctional, disintegrating family relationships we’ve just been watching; or, from another angle, you could say that knowing everything Anna (the maid) knows, we see Agnes’ sense of comfort as a tragically temporary, perhaps even deluded, escape from grim reality,
and
Autumn Sonata,
where Eva’s conciliatory letter to her mother ostensibly introduces some hope, but is severely undercut by our knowledge of how irreparable this mother/daughter relationship is (in fact, as the husband realises, the letter is just painful proof that neither woman will ever be able to escape this nightmare), and by the mother’s silence in the face of her daughter’s attempt to reach out to her. I think there’s a latent malevolence in the attempt to reach out, as well.
The ending of
Through a Glass Darkly likewise offers the hope that this broken family might be repaired. This has been anticipated a couple of times. We’ve seen the father telling his son-in-law that, after his failed suicide, he had felt a sudden love for Karin, Minus and Martin. We’ve seen him give a frank apology to Karin for having neglected her.
And I think you could add other little moments that complicate the overall vision of dysfunction and alienation: David going into the house to cry, and even the fateful entry in his diary, which are both evidence of his sense of guilt, and therefore of his sense of responsibility; the bond between Minus and Karin, tainted by incest but not reducible to it or destroyed by it; the bond between Karin and Martin, problematic because he both infantilises her and resents her lack of sex drive, and because she feels driven away from him towards the voices in the wall, but again still a relationship founded on love of some kind; and the way the three men come together around Karin on the staircase at the end, all of them listening to and perhaps understanding her climactic revelation, whereas before they have kept her illness at arm’s length.
In this context, it makes sense that David would suggest that Karin might be helped by the love of her family. I don’t think the rest of the film has left us with the sense that there is no love at all here, or that Karin (incurable as she may be) is completely beyond the reach of her family’s love. Yes, Karin’s family is in a sense the spider that attacks her, its calm stony face recalling her father’s, and its longing to penetrate her recalling her husband’s and her brother’s. But it’s also, at least potentially, the other kind of God – like the spider, this God is a bit of an anti-climax, because it turns out to be ‘all kinds of love, the most ridiculous and the most sublime’, rather than some all-powerful transcendent being. But it’s something to hold onto, and I think the film has given us just enough reason to think that this is more than an empty hope.
However, the triteness of what David says is also part of what makes this ending interesting. This final conversation is haunted by Martin’s scathing comments (on the boat) about David’s faith, and about his meditations on God in his novels. ‘You flirt with God, but do you really have any faith?’ he says, or words to that effect. ‘Is there a word of truth in any of your books?’ It’s clear from what David says to Minus that he is aware of how inadequate his faith may be: it’s what he rests his ‘dirty hopelessness and emptiness’ in. And it’s perfectly valid for the viewer to feel that David is just doing what he’s always done, aestheticising his daughter’s mental illness for the sake of a would-be inspiring turn of phrase. Even though
Winter Light isn’t actually a sequel to this film, it’s significant that Bergman immediately went on to show Gunnar Björnstrand taking refuge in empty ceremony, having lost all his faith. The ending of that film certainly isn’t trite, but it has the same potential to be read hopefully or sceptically, or a mixture of the two.
Finally, there’s that last line from Minus: ‘Dad talked to me.’ Most obviously, this is another sign of hope. At last, this closed-off father has given his son what he has always wanted, by opening up to him and sharing his innermost thoughts. Both David’s children need to be saved, and this line indicates that there is hope for Minus as well as Karin (the neatness of this ‘two birds with one stone’ effect is part of what makes it feel trite). Again, though, the triteness of the hope being offered up is probably intentional. There’s something kind of sad about how grateful Minus is for this scrap of conversation with his dad. The mere fact that his father has talked to him gives him a sense of hope – but if we, like Martin, have detected the emptiness of David’s professions of faith, we might find it painfully apt that Minus focuses only on his father’s having talked to him, and not on the content of what his father was saying. David looks away for most of his monologue, looking Minus in the eye right at the end as he affirms the possibility of getting through to Karin and helping her; Minus looks intently at him during the monologue, but looks away when his father meets his gaze; so there’s reason to hope alongside evidence of an ongoing problem. I find it hard to express this point clearly, but I’d be interested to know if others have had the same feeling about this last moment of the film.
One other interesting point: the film’s title literally means ‘as if in a mirror’. On the Tartan DVD, there’s a clip of Bergman showing his actors a reproduction of an ancient bronze mirror, which reflects the world rather obscurely. So it’s not inappropriate to include the word ‘darkly’ in the title, but I think ‘through a glass’ is a bit misleading. The film begins with several shots of reflected images in water, followed by an image of four people partially cut off by the water they’re standing in. We see them as a happy family when they’re in this obscuring ‘mirror’, but when face to face with them we find out how broken they really are – and yet, as I said before, we retain something of that initial sense of unity and love. And later on, the wallpaper that Karin stares at serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting light and shadows from outside, showing her different things depending on what passes by the window. Just thought I would raise this point in case anyone wants to make further suggestions about the title’s significance.
