Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) is, despite its winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1961, one of his lesser outings. Part of this is, no doubt, due to the fact that the bulk of the film was not written by Bergman, but by novelist Ulla Isaksson, who based her thin script upon a medieval ballad called Töre’s Daughter At Vänge.
The title of the film is a double entendre which refers to the chaste lead character’s outing during the springtime, and a rivulet of water that emerges from where her corpse is eventually found by her family after she is raped and murdered. Compared to the films which preceded it, it lacks the emotional heft of The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, and compared to the films that followed it, it lacks the filmic daring of Persona or A Passion.
It is an odd film in the Bergman canon, and ranks with Cries And Whispers and The Serpent’s Egg as one of the few filmic mediocrities the director ever crafted. Its characters are wooden, almost unintentionally comic. Their motivations and reactions are wholly stilted and artificial, and the symbolism is often heavy-handed. Fortunately, it’s only an hour and a half in length. It’s little wonder that only a dozen or so years later horror filmmaker Wes Craven (and Sean Cunningham) would launch his forgettable career with a film heavily influenced by, if not flat out based upon, it, called Last House On The Left, with its infamous scene of an angry and vengeful mother biting the penis off one of her daughter’s killers during fellatio.
No, there is no oral sex in the Bergman film, set in medieval times, when Christianity was just displacing the Norse religions. But the film, itself, while miles better than Craven’s initial outing, is almost as wooden in some spots. Some critics have tried to place this as a transition film for Bergman, which it is chronologically speaking, but I think it’s merely a clunker. As said, it lacks all of the qualities that made prior and future films classics.
The story is rather simple, as a spoiled blond virginal beauty named Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) oversleeps on a day she must go to church. Her parents, Töre and Märeta (Max Von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg), are Christians (Märeta is a devout convert, while her husband is bored by the religion) who spoil her rotten. This causes a great deal of friction between Karin and her foster sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), who is dark, gaunt, pregnant out of wedlock, and still worships Odin. Even in such basics, Bergman is far too obvious, as the film never rises above the archetypes that the original medieval ballad establishes.
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Article comments
1 - Chris Beaumont
I have always been curious about this. My Bergman has thus far been limited to Seventh Seal.
I must also take offence at referring to Craven's career as forgettable. If only for the fact that he brought us Freddy. ( I enjoy about half of Craven's output.)
2 - bliffle
Good review. Very thoughtful and provocative.