Many moons ago, before the Great Troll Onslaught that caused so many Brokies and Tremblayans to flee IMDb for safer shores, I submitted a couple of posts on TOB comparing Ennis to other fictional characters (and one historical personage) whose stories seemed to parallel Ennis's own trajectory of love found and lost. I did this because I was seeking to assuage the devastation in my heart left by reflection on Ennis's utter, haunted solitude at story's end. I needed to know that others had known something of Ennis's pain, so that Ennis would not be so alone after all, though he could never know it in the fictional world in which he was ensconced. For the record, the posts (long vanished into cyberspace ether, no doubt due to the handiwork of diligent trolls) discussed Herman Melville's and Benjamin Britten's Captain Vere, Maurice Maeterlinck's and Claude Debussy's Golaud, and, in the historical realm, the mystical Muslim poet Rumi.
Just recently, I was reflecting that another, rather more surprising fictional character could be seen as yet another analogue to our love-haunted Ennis. This is Gertrud, the titular character of Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's last film (Gertrud [1964]). Adapted from a play by the Swedish Hjalmar Soderberg, Dreyer's magisterial swansong is a quiet, contemplative study of the price that unwavering idealism can level upon a human life. Gertrud, played with great poise and elegance by Nina Pens Rode, is a woman who is in love with Love. She holds each of her intimate relationships to a standard of uncompromising perfectionism, so that each man who (inevitably) falls short of her idea of what Love between two souls should be is gently yet unequivocally cut free from her life. By story's end, Gertrud has grown old, alone, reiterating to her one remaining friend her mantra of "Love is All", intimating that she has no regrets for having held out for Love Perfected, even though her dream ultimately eluded her. She will die knowing that she was ever true to herself, and, in her way, to all the men who loved her.
Gertrud resembles Ennis in that both characters ultimately recognize the all-encompassing importance of Love. The characters are significantly different in that Gertrud is as much in love with an idea as with any human being she actually knew, while Ennis is transfixed by his enduring memory of one very special soul. Gertrud is also a strangely static character, always hanging on to the same ideal from youth into old age, while Ennis is seen to evolve from a timid, broken youth barely conscious of his own desires to a man who, despite the ravages of his outer circumstances, cherishes the inner knowledge of the precious gift that another so tenderly lavished upon him. He knows what he is, and what he had with Jack. In his inarticulate manner, he might well concur with Gertrud that Love is indeed All.
Very truly,
Scott
