eva`s dream

no clue, could just be that dreaming feeling that you always think you forgot something. that there is something more beyond what we know & we can't quite reach it. or it just sounds good for the last lines.

I think that she doesn't remember but she tries to remember suggests the possibility for hope that is inherent throughout this movie, the quest of people to keep going no matter what and to find beauty even in the most strange places. Someone somewhere had once told her something, seems good enough to try to figure out what it was and keep going for a few more breaths.

You always think like you forgot smth when you wake up from your dream. Something is always missing and it's hard or almost impossible to recollect those missing moments from the dream.

In her final dream, Eva feels there is something she should remember, something someone said that she has forgotten – something that will justify or make sense of the burning roses, what she and Jan have suffered, this shameless world. But what could this utterance be that will put what has happened in some perspective that can be accepted? “God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”? “This, too, will pass”? “Forgive us, for we have sinned”? None of these nor any other words are relevant, and there is nothing to say except that the world ought not to be this way. Eva's “forgotten memory” is only a desperate, hollow hope when all other words fail and there is nothing but silence.

Shame ends with Jan and Eva huddled down in the boat beside each other. They have just consumed their last food and water. When they returned from town, they had had a picnic of fish and wine and then made love under the table, but this image, too, is replaced when on Sunday morning they sit in a drunken stupor at their table with Jacobi and individually sell themselves. Now, near the end, Jan stares blankly, perhaps asleep; Eva talks quietly. There seems little comfort here, only finality.

Eva's face is beside Jan's, behind him, her arms perhaps around him. There is here one last reference to the iconography of the holy family, with its promise of growth and flourishing, now replaced by that of the pietà, an image that assumes for Bergman a governing place in the geography of the soul. This last bit of human warmth is all that is left between us and the terror of a night without dawn, or smiles.


[Kalin, Jesse. The Films of Ingmar Bergman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.]