Doctor Glas (1968) User Reviews

A remarkable attempt to convey a protagonist's inner life

[philosopherjack · 19 March 2021]

Mai Zetterling's little-known Doctor Glas is a remarkable attempt to convey a protagonist's inner life, all the more so for the aggressively complex nature of the psyche under examination. In the present day, Glas moves as an old man through the city, seen only in shadows, his lack of engagement emphasized by out-of-focus imagery, his mostly self-loathing thoughts heard in voice-over. In almost blinding contrasting clarity, the film shows him as a young man, focusing on his interactions with a prominent clergyman whom he loathes, and the man's much younger wife who asks Glas to help her escape her husband's exercise of his "marital rights." Pushed by a mixture of animus, fixation, and a preoccupation with his own power, he tries to do so first by falsely diagnosing the wife's physical state; later by playing on the clergyman's anxieties about his own health. Glas ultimately takes his intervention to a transgressive high point, but the resulting benefits are more ambiguous than he foresaw, apparently sparking a lifelong reexamination of his action. Per Oscarsson is amazing as Glas, at times cold or impervious, at others uncertain and inadequate, feeling himself distant from his contemporaries (for instant lacking the usual male capacity for easy sexual banter) but quietly eaten away by a failure to chart an alternatively satisfying path. Zetterling visualizes his inner life through stark, sometimes shockingly direct images, dominated by the clergyman in various contorted poses, by a recurring image of the barely-clothed wife, carnally advancing. The film is almost bookended by two scenes in which Glas, using the same unyielding language, refuses to help in terminating a pregnancy, the difference being that the first request comes from a woman and the second from a man; one of many small but potent examples of how Zetterling in this film expands her predominantly feminist perspective.

The perverse monologue darkness of a demigod

[figueroafernando · 8/10 · 24 December 2022]

There is something subtly and hypnotically perverse about someone who helps heal other people but every day believes that their time has come, they even wonder again how that day will end. And how many times have we not sworn to understand that "appearances are deceptive", only that, just where we are least, or when we are least willing to check the adage to the letter is where we least likely expect the cliché to be true. This work is a glorious possibility of cherishing the sincere and execrable vision of a doctor on his patients; only that, what in Kafka's "Rural Doctor", for example, is the insurmountable burden of the doctor for failing to comply with the sick, for failing to achieve their own health codes with the patients, in Dr. Glas it is deictic arrogance, Glas delights in affirming that he is his own judge; What in Kafka is a penalty for failing to swear, in Glas is a deep dislike for others that runs parallel to his professional duties and his purpose of reversing -hypocritically- the symptoms of the sick. Thus, the anecdote of Schopenhauer with his cane is not free. Dr. Glas is not only a misanthropic and contradictory figure like Nietzsche's spiritual teacher, but also while he is in charge of lavishing remedies and cures to reverse diseases and pathological conditions in the town where he lives, he secretly yearns -we know this from his sinister interior monologues - human decay at almost every single stage of life, such as the pregnancy of a passerby, wondering how the love that once was vanished, leaving grime, dirt and withered leaves in the pregnant state? But, was it enough the clamor of the personal ego: "to save lives like a God" of a doctor like Glas, with the vain desire of wishing in his interior the relief-discomfort of his patients? No. It was not enough for Dr. Glas to just wish or yearn and occasionally intervene, he needed to control, manipulate, dominate his patient like a God and Reverend Gregorius was his guinea pig. When his patient died in a Vichy water shop, a scandalous death due to the reputation of such a guy, the doctor only exclaimed: well, we all have to go one day but, just a couple of days later perhaps as an incentive, the funny sequel to seeing Gregorius's wife, Gregorius himself too, stalking his rest and the contrasted photograph as in a contrast turn while in rictus the self-sacrificing doctor dissolves with his demons.

Interesting but Antiseptic, Depressing Character Study

[jfrentzen-942-204211 · 4/10 · 16 February 2020]

This curious film is a clinical examination of a sexually repressed doctor in turn-of-the-century Sweden, and it is as cold and detached as its hero. Dr. Glas (Per Oscarsson) is an old man whose blurry, unhappy existence is plagued by sharply etched memories of the time in his past when he helped an attractive young woman kill her obnoxious husband. The flashbacks are interspersed with his sexual fantasy about that woman. Director Mai Zetterling's surgical style is visually effective, but too antiseptic to evoke much feeling.