幽灵马车

故事发生在新年来临之夜，传说每年的这个夜晚，死神就会来到人间挑选一个做了很大的坏事，犯了很大的罪的人来驾驶他的马车。这次被选到的是个抛妻弃子又嗜酒如命的流浪汉，在流浪汉由于自己的作风问题而即将被夺走生命时，一个孱弱的修女...Made nearly a century ago, THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE is one of Victor Sjöström’s many pictures adapting Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöd’s works, the very first female Nobel-winning writer, and it has been restored to its optimal condition with a freshly contemporary and throbbing score confected by electronic duo KTL. Beginning in medias res, the narrative takes place on a New Year’s Eve, as the young Sister Edit (Holm) of Salvation Army is in extremis after being contracted with consumption for one year, her dying wish is to speak to David Holm (Sjöström himself), a ne’er-do-well middle-aged drunkard. Cross-cut is expeditiously applied to facilitate the unfolding story in company with layered flashbacks to introduce the urban legend of Death’s carriage, and the one who dies in the last minute before the New Year, will have to drive the carriage and collect dead people’s souls for the next year. And during a dust-up, David is struck dead right before the midnight, and his apparition rises above his prostrate body when the incumbent driver George (Svennberg), a friend of David, arrives with the said carriage and announces that he will be his successor. Further flashbacks show David’s blissful life with his wife Anna (Borgström), their two toddler children and his brother (Axelsson), which is shattered into pieces when he is imprisoned for drunken and disorderly, his brother commits murder under both his and alcohol’s pernicious influences, a distressed Anna severs the tie and skips town with their kids. When he is released from the jail, an aggrieved David swears vengeance to Anna and roams the whole country to look for her, finally fetches up in the town where he is taken as the first visitor of Sister Edit’s Salvation Army mission on the previous New Year’s Eve. David’s unrepentant obduracy doesn’t dissuade Edit from seeking out any smidgeon of goodness in him, even she contracts consumption from him, Edit’s holy halo never descends into the rank of an ordinary being, she is consecrated for her unmitigated devotion and benevolence, at one point, even claims David is the love of her life, certainly she doesn’t mean carnally, but that overstretched sanctity and do-goody righteousness can sound jarringly sanctimonious a century later when ethos has been long shifting from that interwar time. While this prim-and-proper, spiritualistic parable has no trouble proselytizing its sage moral tenets to and eliciting cordial commiserations from its audience (Ingmar Bergman credited it most influential for his oeuvre, he also made WILD STRAWBERRIES with Sjöström, the latter’s crowning swan song), THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE is, more influentially in retrospect, acclaimed for its avant grade special effects of the dead walking through closed doors and passing by oblivious living beings, by arduously utilizing double exposures to achieve a consistently flickering, superimposable effect. Also we might locate the progenitor of the galloping horror from a hatchet hacking on a closed door. Enabled by an affectively skilled cast - Sjöström effuses a fierce intensity with David’s duality dangling between cynical callousness and abject repentance; Astrid Holm and Hilda Borgström are also exceptional in their respective physical expressiveness, and Tore Svennberg’s scythe-wielding, cloak-donned imagery is certainly the inspiration of our collective imagination of the Grim Reaper - and a tempo that keeps its story engaging (especially the nail-biting climax), THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE comes off as one of the pioneer works of early cinema grandeur, an unalloyed Nordic wonder that can rival any Hollywood commodity of its time, and run away with it.referential entries: Ingmar Bergman’s WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957, 8.9/10); F.W. Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927, 9.0/10).