Bergman 24: The Rite (1969)

All the familiar Bergmannian themes are present, intermingled in that way he has of constantly teetering on the edge of allegory without offering any kind of "key" to the "meaning" of the film (see The Silence in particular), but this is still a strikingly unusual film. The film plays the theatrical off against the cinematic; none of it couldn't take place on a stage (the explicit division into titled scenes underlines this), but the intense and almost continual use of close-ups gives it an intrusiveness that is somehow without intimacy and that I think would be very difficult to achieve in the theatre. Bergman himself appears as a priest, robed within a confessional, perhaps deliberately recalling Death in The Seventh Seal. The film's themes might hover too much between the over-familiar and the (presumably) personally hermetic, but there is a hypnotic intensity to everything - particularly in the bewildering (and also almost continuous) swings between dominance and submission in the various permutations of the characters - that is engrossing, even as the emotional temperature never truly rises. I presume that this is a deliberate effect, given the film's concern with performance - the most affecting performance is most vulnerable to being exposed as merely affected.