Maybe it is just that I am nostalgic for Prague, three years later, and just got an email that Arnost Lustig will be in Kalamazoo soon, but this movie I just watched on TV has got me thinking. The movie is The Visit (1964) starring Ingrid Bergman, and although it isn’t as artsy as the Czech films we watched in Prague, it has that same dark flavor to it. I suggest that anyone who hasn’t watched it Netflix it immediately. The gist of the movie is that Bergman was run out of town as a pregnant teen after filing a paternity suit against her lover. He bribes two witnesses for a bottle of brandy each to say that she is promiscuous. The authorities take her child, who quickly dies in an institution, label her a fallen woman, and she becomes a big city prostitute. Years later, she returns, a wealthy woman, with a proposition for the town that turned its back on her. They are struggling…the local mines, the factory, the riverside...all their business has mysteriously dried up and she offers th...
Feminism, poetry, poetics.