"The Seventh Seal" tells the story of a catastrophe that occurred during the Crusades, where plagues ran rampant, people hurt each other, adultery, killing, insults, suspicion, and fear shrouded the entire film.
The knight who came back from the battlefield began to doubt the correctness of God. He played chess with the god of death again and again and deceived the god of death with tricks. He seemed brave, but at the last moment he revealed his cowardly nature. In order to survive, even he would ask the help of the god of nothingness.
The knight's entourage is more distrustful of everything than the master. He is just but very cruel. He spares criminals time and time again, but he can watch innocent girls burn to death as witches. When criminals are killed by the plague, he can face them calmly. , telling yourself what to do is useless.
The blacksmith and his wife, in the mutual deception, are looking for warmth in each other. The blacksmith clearly believed in his wife's cheating, but he was unwilling to face loneliness. He would rather believe her nonsense and claim that his relationship with his wife was better than most couples.
I believe Bergman must have seen Akutagawa Ryunosuke's works. In the film, the criminals steal the property of the dead, the entanglement between the blacksmith and his wife and the actors, all directly used "Rashomon" and "In the Bamboo Forest". plot. It's just that Bergman made these plots more comical and ironic.
In the end, this unrelated group finally returned to the knight's house on a stormy night. The knight's wife waited for her husband for ten years, but only saw fear and exhaustion in his eyes. Love has disappeared like cannon fire in the long painful memory.
Almost all the episodes that give people hope in this film take place when the wandering entertainer appears. Joseph and his beautiful wife, Mia, take their one-year-old son, Milk, to perform everywhere. The carriage is their home, but poverty has not taken away Joseph's talent and love between them.
In the tavern, Joseph was mistaken by the blacksmith for the actor who kidnapped his wife, and was almost killed, but when he fled back to Mia, he happily took out a silver bracelet and gave it to his wife. For him, no matter how dangerous it was just now, it was worth it. And Mia, despite being favored by the handsome knight, was not tempted in the slightest.
The most touching scene in the film is that evening, when the knight and his entourage were entertained by Mia, drinking milk, eating wild strawberries, and listening to Joseph play the lute. At that moment, heaven is on earth.
I think Bergman planned to let Joseph's family escape the doomsday judgment from the beginning, and he let Joseph see the apparition of the Virgin in the beginning of the film. Therefore, even if Joseph also saw the god of death, he successfully escaped with the help of the knight. But what I don't know is that at that moment, the knight clearly gave up the fight with the god of death.
Perhaps, he has understood that no matter life or death, only with true love can you live in heaven.
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