Amor Omnia: Dryer's GERTRUD

The titular character in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s directorial swan song muses early on about how sad it is for people to fall in love. That statement serves as the central viewpoint of this gorgeous and quietly devastating Danish masterpiece about the romantic travails in an opera singer’s life (played with hushed sensitive elegance by Nina Pens Rode). She examines the pinpoint lovers in her life from a past flame Gabriel (Ebbe Rode), her present dull marriage to Gustav (Bendt Rothe), and the beacon of a future love life with a young man named Erland (Baard Owe). Most of the film is concentrated into long stretches of conversations in rooms with dialogue that features declaratives, recollections, confessions, significant dreams, and filterless emotions dried into eloquent words. What could be a stuffy exercise in cinema as a filmed play instead lives and breathes in a fluid, oneiric atmosphere of muted minimal purity.

Plot wise, Gertrud mainly floats around a standard love-triangle set-up, but Dreyer uses the simple story to examine the dynamics between the characters in the piece. He inspires trust in the actors to dive into their thoughts and accepted weaknesses with patient reflectiveness. They speak in candid cadences that isn't natural, but somehow realistic in terms of the recognizable folly that comes with people desperate to connect to someone else body and soul. Gertrud herself is a sensitive woman who refuses to compromise her exact romantic needs, which conflicts with fellow artists Gabriel (a celebrated poet) and Erland (a skilled pianist) enough to outweigh their mutual interests. Her marriage to the decent, dull politician Gustav highlights the institutionalized marriage system that stifles her less-traditional sensibilities. The refusal she insists on as the film unfolds (for reasonable needs) becomes moving in its heartbreaking conviction.

The set designs capture specific 20th Century details in cozy textures like the paintings which adorn the walls, and Dreyer employs precise camera work that allows the actors to dig into their emotions with ease in these spaces. Each actor subdues their desires that spark inside, and the interplay through Dreyer’s straight-forward, unobtrusive direction is hypnotic. Brushes of hot window light and deep shadows shape the film into a gallery of images that suggest the calm isolation in each character. These players are blocked perfectly to suit the relation between one another to further elaborate on their states of mind, whether they hold each other or stand on opposite sides of a room. He practices an analytical restraint without creating a massive distance. A lot of maturity and confidence is needed to linger on the faces of actors for effect, but the man who wrought Joan of Arc's passion in a sequence of close-ups showed once again that perhaps no one in cinema has done it better.

Dryer shot this last work after a nine-year gap, and his life-long mastery as an artist shows in every scene. Gertrud's surprising final scene startles with its broader retrospective overview. It contains a monologue about death that's among the most beautiful conclusions to talented filmmaker's career. Gertrud has a wise, bittersweet moment of both clarity and confusion for one person's accurate notion of love's pain through pleasure. A life lesson brought on by years of experience that shows romance as a source of struggle, and how much worse people are who don't strive to feel it. The ethereal power of Dryer's last ode to cinema is sharing the gentle strife attached to love, which through his skills becomes a kind of love itself that stays inside each viewer.