Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Starring Henrik Malberg, Emil Hass Christensen, Cay Kristiansen, Preben Lerdorff Rye Club, QFT, Belfast, 125 min
Religious devotion has never been the most fashionable subject in serious world cinema. It was, however, a recurring theme in the absurdly lengthy, inspirational career of Carl Theodor Dreyer.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, the Danish director’s 1928 film, attacked the topic with a near monomaniacal intensity. Ordet (1955) allows just a little more air into the room, but it carries the same imposing moral weight and showcases the same purity of purpose.
Based on a play by Kaj Munk, Ordet details the travails of a rural family in some bleak corner of Denmark. A religiously observant widower struggles with the demands of three sons: one, an agnostic, is married and expecting a child; another has fallen for the daughter of zealot; a third has been driven mad by his studies of Kierkegaard and now thinks himself to be Jesus Christ.
There is something of Dostoevsky in Munk’s story. The film drones with the same worried prayers to a neglectful God. The piece is equally divided as to the possibility of miracles. Like the Russian’s novels, Ordet will intrigue sceptics and believers in equal measure.
The sense that some greater power may be at work is conveyed as much through image as language. Henning Bendtsen’s stark, monochrome photography, comprising achingly long takes, has a positively liturgical seriousness to it.
Ordet, however, definitely takes a northern, Protestant spin on Christianity. The film is beautiful. It is genuinely moving. It has enduring power. But, even if viewed on the softest of sofas, the picture does make you feel as if you’ve spent two hours on a splintery bench in a windy church. In other words, it does you good.
