The Serpent’s Egg(1977)
Igmar Bergman, during exile in Munich, teams up with producer Dino De Laurentiis to make Bergman’s only Hollywood picture, The Serpents Egg. A film exploring the dark realities of Germany in 1923. It’s economical collapse, the rise of anti-Semitism, and the anxieties of a world on the brink of war. I am surprised by how much I enjoyed this. It’s a beautiful looking film, with some great performances, and an ending that while a little moustache twirly, leaves you feeling uneasy about both the characters’ future and our own.
David Carradine plays our lead, Abel Rosenberg, a down on his luck trapeze artist who’s been out of work after his partner and brother is injured. Abel is a sad sack of a man. He feels, maybe prophetically, that there is no future to be hopeful for. The world around him is falling apart, his Jewish background is beginning to feel like a target on his back, and his crippling depression is only made worse by the unexpected suicide of his brother. I don’t love Carradine in this role. He lacks nuance that the rest of the actors seem to grasp, even in the most melodramatic moments. He stumbles around in scenes like a high schooler trying to portray being drunk before ever experiencing it personally. There is an aimlessness that he embodies that while true to the character, often feels like an actor out of place, than an intentional performance.
On the other end of the performance spectrum is Liv Ullmann, who perfectly captures the complexity of Manuela, Abel’s sister-in-law. Manuela is a woman making her own way after leaving the circus and her husband. Working as a Cabaret performer and ocassional sex worker has provided Manuela with a more than comfortable life in a time of termoil, and puts her in a position to try and help Abel pull out of his depressive state. Liv Ullmann really shines in this role. The emotional and physical toll of trying to help Abel through this dark period is tearing her apart. Dismantling the life she had made, all in an attempt to ease the guilt she feels for the death of her ex-husband.
The film also introduces us to Inspector Bauer, a police officer who’s trying to find the smallest bit of order, in a world that has turned upside down. Beyond the strange suicide of Abel’s brother, the inspector is also attempting to solve several strange murders that seem unconnected, and yet find Abel as a loose connective thread between them. Bauer, from my point of view, seems uninterested in Abel as a suspect, but more as a way into understanding how these murders are connected. He suspects something dark has taken root in his town, and yet is unable to put the pieces together. It’s this subplot that the film uses to infect Abel, and the audience, with the sense of paranoia that sits at the heart of the film and is explored more thoroughly as the film progresses.
That paranoia and anxiety felt by the viewer and the characters in the film stems from our own knowledge of the future. Our main character is Jewish, like a number of other characters we see, but he’s also a failed artist who lives on the fringes of society. He spends most of his time with sex workers, drug addicts and the downtrodden, in brothels, bars and underground clubs. For these people, the world could not be tougher and their dark reality is portrayed in the decaying world that surrounds them. The rubble, the unending rain, the lack of food, the economic instability, it feels unbearable. One woman even suggests that she already lives in Hell itself. It’s an apt description, and yet we know as the audience that it will only get worse from here. The rise of Nazism and the darkness and death that stems from it is starting to appear just over the horizon.
The Serpent’s Egg is a film that reminds us that true evil doesn’t just appear to us one day fully formed, it grows slowly over time, right in front of us.
