Two People (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1945) (Patreon)

Following the artistic triumph of Day of Wrath, Dreyer made Two People, a film that has a fairly shaky reputation. By some accounts the production was troubled; Dreyer apparently did not like either of the two lead actors but was prevented from replacing them. (The Cowboy: "These are the two people.") After it sat on the shelf it got a cursory release, after which Dreyer made six documentary shorts until he was able to return to feature filmmaking in 1955 with Ordet. Suffice to say, Two People derailed Dreyer, ending a significant winning streak (Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath).

In some ways Two People appears to be an attempt at a chamber-drama version of a murder mystery, and taken on those terms alone, it probably looks like a failure. But seen in the context of what would become Dreyer's primary aesthetic mode, perfected in Ordet and Gertrud, Two People looks more like a pivotal transition, an attempt to dislodge cinema from the primacy of story and psychological motivation. This film is so fundamentally weird -- at times it resembles a European riff on Edgar G. Ulmer -- that it's hard to dismiss.

The opening five minutes are a dense montage of the sort we might expect in the silent era. Amidst close-ups of bubbling test tubes and Bunsen burners, we see newspaper headlines intended to shock. There is a scandal in the world of Danish medical academia! The promising graduate student Arne Lundell (Georg Rydeberg) has made a breakthrough in the treatment of schizophrenia. But wait! A senior colleague, Sander (Gabriel Alw) has accused Lundell of plagiarizing his work on schizophrenia. The similarities are striking! Could it possibly be a coincidence? The world wants to know!

Essentially, Dreyer has dispensed with what could have reasonably been the first two acts of Two People in a hysterically paced summary, so we can get to the potential fallout from this accusation. Lundell comes home to his adoring wife Mairanne (Wanda Rothgardt), telling her that he has been dismissed from his hospital position, after announcing publicly that Sander should be shot dead. Shortly thereafter, Sander is in fact discovered dead. Lundell's own pistol is found on the scene, along with a monogrammed glove, "AL." Since there is no Mark Fuhrman in this scenario, the evidence is damning. But Lundell insists that he didn't do it.

Merely from a formal standpoint, Two People is bizarre. Given that it is mostly a two-hander, most of the film consists of dialogue between Arne and Marianne. But in nearly every scene, the visual grammar of their conversations is maddeningly askew. In two-shots, their eyes never meet. In shot / reverse-shot sequences, the eyelines are wildly off. In fact, one scene showing the two of them looking in a mirror cuts back and forth repeatedly, between their bodies and their reflections, with Marianne's arms in completely different places.

Based on Dreyer's previous achievements, we know that this isn't incompetence. One could argue that it reflects sloppy inattention on a project he didn't want to be involved in, but these technical oddities are so insistent throughout Two People that it makes more sense to think Dreyer was actively subverting the film through his direction. Perhaps in doing so, he discovered that some "bad" technique has expressive potential he hadn't counted on.

In the shot above, Arne and Marianne are talking. Then suddenly, Dreyer cuts to another framing that is incrementally closer, not enough to mean anything but certainly enough to notice:

Shortly thereafter, Dreyer reverts to the original framing. 

In the end, Lundell learns that there are perfectly logical explanations for how Sander died, and even how the plagiarism occurred, that absolve him of any guilt. On the one hand, this involves a lot of last-minute revelations and narrative chicanery. It is utterly unsatisfying. But in the broader context of Two People, an alternate reading hovers insistently in the background. Why was Lundell accused of plagiarism? Because someone was working against him. Why? Because the person closest to him has betrayed him. How will this be resolved? [SPOILER] With double suicide.

But considering that Dreyer's introduction informs us that schizophrenia itself is at the heart of Two People, are we meant to take its narrative at face value? It makes more sense that Arne is the murderer, and that he did it because his theft of Sander's research was discovered. But instead, an entire history of deception has put him in the victim's position, giving the lie to all obvious explanations. This is almost a textbook version of Freud's analysis of paranoid schizophrenia: the subject is victimized, responsible for nothing, persecuted by all and sundry, controlled by outside forces. Regardless of intent, Dreyer has made an incontrovertibly schizophrenic film, one that asks us to take nothing at face value, including its title.