‘the serpents egg’

on the last day of the enforced holiday.. though i did go to college in the morning (like i did on friday and saturday) to check out if there was anything to be done. it was completely shut and juhu scheme still looked like a disaster. came back home and decided to watch on eof the bergman films that have been sitting at home for the past few months 'the seprents egg'..

it was the first film i have seen based in the berlin of the 1920’s that focuses not so much on the horrors of the holocaust but on the festering hatred that led to it. in bergmans film from 1977 a jewish aamerican trapeze artist and his sister in law are mourning the suicide of his brother when a strange series of mysterious murders begins to draw them into their web.

what starts off as a relatively straightforward story suddenly goes wild in the second half of the film as new facts reveal themselves about the clinic where they work and the man who gave them shelter. the movie touched upon the cold hard rationality of the pseudo-science that led to the systematic annihilation of jews and allowed human beings to be treated no better than cattle.

“in a serpents egg the transparent outer membrane can barely conceal the fully grown reptile inside.”

besides this fairly obvious explanation for the title, there were many more instances where instead of trusting us to understand bergman insisted on making the characters vocalize their emotions,’ i am feeling guilty’. nowhere here the innuendo and dense metaphors of ‘the seventh seal’- for me- losing something on the way and getting a little too pat and predictable. even the characters seem stereotypical. still definitely worth watching though if only for the last 20 minutes or so and the portrayal of the gradual build up of fear around the characters.