Gösta Berling’s the worst kind of screw-up: the talented kind. He was the best preacher his parishioners ever heard. He cared about them. But he was also a drunk, who emptied a bottle every night and found truth at the bottom. And so Gösta (Lars Hanson) got defrocked. Such was a deep-drinking, deep-thinking lad’s fate in 19th-century Sweden.
The Saga of Gösta Berling is about a preacher’s fall, at least on the surface. It’s also about Greta Garbo, who appears here as Elizabeth, a role that would bring her to America’s attention soon after. But there’s so much more. Over the course of an immense, but swift-moving 184 minutes, Gösta Berling takes aim at the foundation of society itself. That is, the tension between inspiration and deviance on one hand, and convention and conformity on the other. Both are necessary; both can be abused. And it is Gösta’s suffering, far more than Elizabeth’s, which makes this point. Don’t take my word for it, though; take Mauritz Stiller’s. He directed Gösta Berling, and though a supporter and friend of Garbo’s, even he was willing to keep Elizabeth off-screen for half the film.
