Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Lee Eisenberg Carl Theodor Dreyer's final movie focuses on a woman who decides that she no longer wants to be with her husband. "Gertrud" contains several long shots in which the characters express their unhappiness. Basically, the whole movie is an excuse to test your attention span. But at the same time, it lets these Scandinavians stereotype themselves. Deliberately slow-moving, it lets the characters sit there and be endlessly morose. Their attitudes amount to boredom. I've seen movies from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and so it seems that the Danes are the most inclined to be somber and slow. Scandinavia has the highest quality of life in the world and yet their movies make it look as if life sucks. Why? Is it because their winters see limited sunlight? The only other Dreyer movies that I've seen are "Vampyr" and "Ordet". I'm going to assume that most of his movies were more like this movie and "Ordet". The only scene here that's even mildly lively is the ceremony honoring the returning poet, and the movie basically uses that scene for satire.If you're someone who's really into hardcore, deep, inward cinema, this will probably be the movie for you. Otherwise you'll very likely find it one of the more boring movies out there.

Jackson Booth-Millard This was the last film from director Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Ordet), and this Danish film was listed as one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die in the book, so I was very keen. Basically, set in the early 20th Century in Stockholm, former opera singer Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode) is married to lawyer and politician Gustav Kanning (Bendt Rothe), she tells him that she has become upset that he cares more about his career and status than her, and she confesses that she has met another man who loves her and vice versa, so she wants a divorce. Her lover is the promising young pianist Erland Jansson (Baard Owe), she explains to him she is now devoted to him, she does not show up to meet Gustav who was picking her up at the evening opera, and she starts living with Jansson. The next evening though the Kannings do attend a house dinner party hosted by another man Gertrud had a relationship with in the past, poet Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode), and also attending is her friend Axel Nygen (Axel Strøbye). Gustav decides to confront his wife about the night at the opera, and demands they spend time together for one more night before a divorce happens, and meanwhile she is told by Lidman that Jansson has been bragging about her being his latest conquest. Gertrud decides to give her new lover the chance to redeem himself by telling him she wants to leave everything else behind and go away with him, but he reveals he cannot do this as he is expecting another woman to give birth to his child. She leaves him and has another encounter with Lidman, he tries to convince her to go away with him instead, but she remembers in the past he too cared more for his career than her, so she refuses, and following this Gustav tries a last attempt to get her to stay with him, even allowing her another lover, but she moves to Paris alone to study psychology. Thirty years pass, and Gertrud looks back at her life and says to Nygen that the only meaningful thing in life is love, but she has not compromised her position being alone and giving into the attention of any man, she does not regret this decision or anything else. Also starring Karl Gustav Ahlefeldt, Vera Gebuhr as The Kannings' Maid, Lars Knutzon as Student orator, Anna Malberg as Kanning's mother and Edouard Mielche as The Rector Magnificus. The story of a woman having an affair out of marriage with another man who is not really in love with her is a good concept, the film is full of clever and interesting to watch scenes, especially those with long takes, including a near ten minute talk between the poet and his former love, the costumes and sets in black and white were good too, it is was a very intriguing and likable drama. Very good!

Martin Bradley Even by Dreyer's standards "Gertrud" displays a rigidity rare in cinema. When it first appeared critics hated it, (just as they hated "The Searchers" and "Vertigo"). Now, of course, all three films are considered masterpieces but while "Vertigo" and "The Searchers" were commercial films aimed at a mass audience, "Gertrud" was strictly art-house, the kind of film critics were expected to like. It was also Dreyer's last film and it was archetypal Dreyer but this was also the mid-sixties and movies had moved on. We had had a renaissance in France and Italy and Czechoslovakia and even in the UK while America's 'New Wave' was just about to strike. It was a time for young film-makers and Dreyer was an old man. "Gertrud" looked and felt like it could have been made 30 years earlier. Of course, hindsight is a great thing and today "Gertrud" seems more 'modern' than many of the fashionable 'flash-in-the-pan' movies that hit us in the sixties and which now seem like time-capsules from a by-gone age. "Gertrud's" almost somnambulist pace and Dreyer's insistence on long takes, keeping his actors mostly static while allowing his camera to move, however slowly and deliberately, instead now seems almost revolutionary at a time when movies were chiefly about movement and movement in a pell-mell style. While taken from a 1906 play the theme of the film also seems peculiarly modern for the mid-sixties. It's about a woman's liberation from the constraints that men would seek to put upon her, even if that freedom means the sacrifice of romantic love in favour of higher, more intellectual pursuits. At the beginning of the film Gertrud leaves her stuffed-shirt of a husband because he's not prepared to love her unconditionally and attaches herself to a younger man who showers with romantic affection. But his love, too, is a sham and Gertrud is just another of his many conquests, so Gertrud leaves both men, and the poet she truly loved but who put his work above her and has now returned to reclaim her, and settles instead for a solitary but more 'intellectually' satisfying existence. It is a cold movie, it moves at a snail's pace and it is a film of ideas almost devoid of emotion if not feeling, (there is so little happening on screen it often seems like it could just as easily have been done on the radio). The acting is either intensely wooden or deeply cerebral depending on your point of view and since the characters are really only paradigms it is very difficult to engage with any of them. But it is also an incredibly beautiful film, displaying all of Dreyer's visual mastery, (as a 'stylist' Dreyer has always seemed very under-valued), and it's a film that challenges our preconceptions of what a romantic melodrama should be. Even by European art-house standards this is a much more rigorous dissection of the relations between men and women than we are used to. It won't be to everyone's taste but stick with it and you will be richly rewarded with a difficult and a bold film that strives to be a serious work of art and more than succeeds in its aims.

Howard Schumann Werner Erhard says, "You don't have to go looking for love when it is where you are coming from". For the chilly, statuesque wife in Carl Dreyer's last film Gertrud, love is not a living, breathing reality, but an ideal to be sought in its purest form. Reviled in its day for its being an artistic anachronism, Gertrud is now recognized for the complex masterpiece it truly is. With its long takes and static camera, it seems at odds with the French New Wave jump cuts and innovative techniques, yet it has much in common with those films of the 60s that depict the soulless fragmentation and alienation of modern life even though Gertrud takes place at the turn of the century.In Gertrud, love is something to strive for but is unattainable on Earth and each character (like perhaps Dreyer himself) is a figure living to one degree or another in loneliness. Shot with very few close-ups, the camera keeps us at a distance throughout, perhaps reminding us of the isolation of the human condition. Based on a 1906 play of the same name by Hjalmar Soderberg, Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode), a former professional singer, is an emotionally unfulfilled woman who finds something missing in the four primary relationships in her life. She is married to Gustav (Bendt Rothe), an ambitious politician, but sees him as being more interested in his career than in her.She is in love with a young concert pianist, Erland Jannson (Baard Owe), but is repelled by his consorting with other women and using her name to brag to others about his conquests. She feels that another suitor, poet Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode), cares more about fulfilling his own desires than nurturing hers, and that psychologist Axel (Axel Strobye) is more interested in an intellectual liaison than a physical one. Although her emotional expression never becomes very intense, Gertrud tells Gustav that she is leaving him on the very day that he is supposed to receive a promotion to cabinet rank. Deeply hurt by her suggestion that he didn't show her enough love, he pleads with her not to leave him but his pleas are met with coldness.When she tells him that she is going to the opera that evening, he pursues her to the theater, only to discover that she did not tell him the truth about her whereabouts. In the drive to the opera, we are privy to Gustav's thoughts, the only time during the film that we are allowed entry into the character's mind. He is determined to win her back, only to discover later that she stayed at the home of Erland Jannson. In a subsequent meeting with Erland in the park, she asks him to go away with her so that they can live together by the sea but he rejects the idea, telling her that he has a relationship with Constance that he cannot break off. It is shortly thereafter that an old lover, poet Gabriel Lidman, reveals that he ran into Erland at a party, boasting of the fact that he had conquered the aloof Gertrud.Gabriel has returned to Denmark to receive an award and has his heart set on reviving his amorous relationship with Gertrud. However, in one of the film's most telling moments, shown in flashback, she recalls finding a note on Gabriel's desk that says "A woman's love and a man's work are mortal enemies". She uses that note to not only rebuff Gabriel but to reject all suitors and decide that she can never find happiness with a man. Refusing to compromise and stuck in the notion that spiritual fulfillment must include emotional pain, Gertrud at long last finds her destiny but only at the cost of emotional connection.