friends from Sweden, and Anders Mariah .
Around Sjöstrom Swedish director Viktor (1879-1960) continues to weigh a fairly distorted, since, despite being universally considered one of the most important European film pioneers silent era, is today remembered for a rare (though brilliant) forays into Hollywood melodrama Wind (The Wind, 1928), played by Lillian Gish, or his emotional involvement as lead actor in Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957), that not all of his work, worth considerable even contemplating a bird's eye view. Sjöstrom is precisely the director and main performer Körkarlen (1921) translated as The Phantom Carriage, which is how we will mention here. More than a great film in the strict sense The Phantom Carriage is a beautiful morality tale with supernatural background, despite his apparent allegiance to the conventions of melodrama more melodramatic nineteenth century, boasts a unique and complex narrative construction that rises well above the prosaic intent exemplary of its plot, placing it in an indescribable level between the earthly and spiritual, rational and irrational, the ordinary and extraordinary . 
The film begins with a particular sequence of dramatic density that largely sets the tone that will chair the whole story. We are New Year's Eve, the young Sister Edith is dying on his deathbed, in his last hours accompanied by her mother and Maria, his partner in the Salvation Army, Edith asks the last will see a man named David Holm, which scandalized those who attend, since they consider the latter responsible for having caused the illness that is destroying his life, but trying to find access to see him before it's too late . Advised of the situation shortly after the site is presented in Ms. Holm, wife of David, then produced a rare moment: the latter is slowly approaching the bedside of the sick, with clenched hands and, apparently, ready to download their anger on the girl, but embraces Edith, begging forgiveness: Ms. Holm, moved, is unable to resist to this expression of affection from someone who hates and therefore, moved, returned the hug. The goodness of the dying has appeased the jealous hatred of the woman who has been humiliated and abandoned by her husband. Love is above all other considerations. In a sense, what counts The Phantom Carriage is precisely the process of discovering the love that the protagonist, David Holm (played by himself Sjöstrom), carried out by means of a dual experience, vital and paranormal, which is also developing at two levels: on the one hand, their daily reality, marked by alcoholism and abuse frequently professed their loved ones (from his wife and two young daughters to Edith, the girl that is daring to sympathize with their situation of degeneration and tries to help out of it) and, secondly, that of an otherworldly reality, marked by the weight of a legend (the curse of the Phantom Carriage), which at bottom is nothing but a manifestation of their own private ghosts, or whatever it is, its bad conscience. 
The Phantom Carriage adopts a complex temporal structure based flashbacks that stands not only one of its greatest attractions, but also the element that gives the film more fantastic nature, above its initial classification as melodrama. During the night of Weekend Year in which Edith is dying unhappy, David Holm is drunk sitting next to two drunk near the cemetery in Stockholm. The euphoric David begins to narrate a story in person years lived at the time when a student at Uppsala. The protagonist recalls a roommate named George, as an alcoholic as he is now, and also in a New Year's Eve, we told the curse of the Phantom Carriage. This says that Death takes its service to a man who died at midnight on New Year, which is required to drive for a year the Phantom Carriage charge of collecting the souls of dead until, in the following New Year's Eve, someone is responsible for taking their place relieve, every New Year's night, the terror took hold of Georges at the possibility that he could die at midnight and be forced to play this macabre task. It is particularly significant that Sjöstrom not limited to displaying the flashback on student life of David but also on the scene also put images as beautiful as terrifying ghost of the cart driver and his sinister hooded conducting and collecting his sordid task for an equal, as a suicide, by their own volition, has decided to take his life as a man who accidentally drowned into the sea crashing against the rocks his boat. The display of these flashbacks goes beyond mere reporting function for the spectator place the story directly into the mind of the main character and, therefore, as already noted, in terms of their own personal ghosts: his consciousness. 
This is crucial to understand the full extent of the changing nature of David, who over the New Year (which has the same function as described by Dickens Christmas Carol Christmas ) will be reviewing his life and will, eventually, a landmark decision to amend. Without going any further, at the end of his story, David will soon embark on a stupid fight with the drunkards who accompany him and which, apparently, will perish, one of them bangs on the head with a bottle, leaving him lying on the soil. The clock bell sounding the twelve o'clock and, consequently, the Phantom Carriage translucent soon makes its appearance. A visual effect, so simple and poetic, shows us David leaving his mortal body and facing the driver of the wagon, which is none other than Georges! Forced, like Scrooge, to accompany this spectral being who promises her eternal damnation, David is driven by Georges to stay where Edith is dying, while the protagonist, via flashback , is recalling the events of his existence, in one way or another, have led to his current situation. His first memory is a beautiful pastoral evocation of the moments of happiness lived with his wife, two daughters and his younger brother, during a picnic: a deliberately stereotypical picture also serves to draw a special Sjöstrom contrast to the dramatic episode that is remembered by David below. The protagonist wakes up in a local prison cell where he is warned by a police officer known for years, David has been locked because of a fight caused under the influence of alcohol, and police criticizes their tendency to get drunk and get violent, but the worst is yet to come, as in the cell next to yours is enclosed his brother, who in the same fight killed another man and is now awaiting trial for murder and sentenced to death. David feels responsible for what happened and vows never again to drink. 
But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions: a new time shift shows drunk David again, poor and degraded, seeking shelter for the night in a Salvation Army home. He meets Edith, who provides a bed to sleep safe from the cold. While David sleeps, the girl takes the coat of the protagonist and spends the rest of the night to sew all their holes and tears. The next morning, David wakes up and, without giving any sign of gratitude for the charity received, he leaves, but not before expressing his contempt for the piety of Edith with a gesture of extreme cruelty, one by one, break before the girl all the patches that he has sewn. However, this first encounter with Edith will be crucial in the life of the protagonist: to highlight it, Sjöstrom, the film has begun with the opening of the iris of the camera on the image of the patient Edith in his bed of death, now closes the iris on the girl right at the end of this last sequence, thus creating an association.
Back in Edith's room, where David and Georges spectral talk with the dying (a splendid detail: the young, and more dead than alive, you can see and talk to the driver of the wagon and soul ghost a penalty for David, unequivocal sign that the end is near.) The image evokes the protagonist Edith other times spent with her and his own wife: a sequence inside a tavern in which David and his colleagues humiliate drunk Maria Edith and when the latter try to distribute leaflets, a subsequent in that, at the insistence of Edith, David comes in a Mass celebrated by the Salvation Army and a third sequence in which, trying to resume their family life with his wife and daughters, David returns home drunk and has a new access to violent, culminating with the main character hacks destroying the door of the room where the frightened women and girls have taken refuge from his wrath, amazing moment for both its dramatic force and for its uncanny resemblance to a famous sequence Glare (The Shining, 1980), to the extent that it can be said with little margin for error that should have taken that Stanley Kubrick's film Sjöstrom idea. But how great this way telling lies in the successful feeling of emotional subjectivity that is all told, under which is just as valid to think that we see a reconstruction of events as an interpretation of what happened from the point of view of the protagonist.
At the climax of the deal, the Swedish director again suggestive propose another violation of the conventional narrative in the form of a simple parallel montage effect. David wakes up in the cemetery is alive. But before the hero regains consciousness, we have seen how his wife is, at the same time, preparing a dose of poison with which to kill the girls think and suicide, as a last and desperate way out of their misery, when David joins, insert a flat Sjöstrom wife preparing the deadly potion, in the next shot, David know, sight unseen, but sensing, which his wife tries to do, and runs to stop him. The protagonist arrives in time to prevent the tragedy and, begging the forgiveness of his wife begged him to let him stay at his side. The film concludes with the joy of this reunion desperate and at the same time, with the doubt over the future of the couple, hence the decision of the same is not exactly a "happy ending." On the other hand, David has been really dead? Or has everything been part of his delirium, the result of mixing alcohol and remorse? The virtue that makes this film so extraordinary is not clear, leading to its conclusion a story grounded at all times of uncertainty: The Phantom Carriage is revealed in this way, a thoroughly modern and avant-garde film, regardless After many years of its completion.
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