Adapted from a play, and makes little effort to be other than theatrical, except that on stage it would look rather strange the way the characters keep getting up from their seats to sit down somewhere else in the same room. It works better with a cut and a new camera angle. Just a bunch of dreams stitched together, how Gertrud sees the world.
There is some ironic humor in this film, like the student who gives a speech about Gabriel’s work. He says his poetry eschewed old-fashioned, restrictive values about sex in favor of treating eroticism as the only real part of love. A very serious-looking man in a suit speaking about the significance of radical erotic passion in the middle of an excessively formal proceeding.
Gertrud not only leaves her lovers, but insists that their love can never be rekindled. Since it ended once, it no longer can ever live up to her standard. It's not clear what that standard is, and it's evolved over time, according to her. She leaves them when she no longer believes they love her anymore; that she believes this comes as a surprise to them, since she is so important to them that her departure wounds them in a way they don't seem able to recover from. Gertrud attributes the problems with their thinking partly to the standards to which men hold themselves and their received wisdom on what a woman's role is.
Like in Ordet, we get to know the film's environments simply by sitting with them for a long time as the characters go about their activities; but in Ordet the characters are often in motion, working at something. In Gertrud they're most often seated, and move around only occasionally, often without any clear practical purpose. In Ordet, the dissolution of dialogue into unanswerable questions is met with ongoing activity, a persistence in sustaining life. In Gertrud, the characters are stuck. She says she doesn't believe in God, so God's role in Ordet and The Passion of Joan of Arc has no place here, but the unanswerable questions remain. Trudging to the event horizon of belief and pushing through with sheer feeling is the dominant principle of Dreyer's most acclaimed films, but here the feeling is only vaguely, momentarily grasped, if at all. Or, maybe the sadness felt after the relationships end is enough to push past, but will be all that remains afterward, instead of the ecstasy seen in his other films.
Some critics found Gertrud boring while praising films with similar quietude and slowness. They attributed some meaning to the slowness of those other films; in Gertrud, it’s just part of the characters’ conversations. Things move at the pace of their thinking, and last as long as it takes for them to run out of energy. They change seats because at some point they just need to move. In one sense the film is almost all conversations; in another it's all surfaces, places where the characters don't seem to do anything important other than talk, surrounded by aesthetic objects. They don't look at each other; maybe that would be too much to take in.
At the event at Gabriel's house, she sits in front of a painting of Venus being pursued by a pack of dogs, and Gertrud recalls a dream she had in which the same thing happened to her. This happens right after her friend Axel tells her about his experiments in dream interpretation and thought transference. It could be that artworks are an instrument of sharing dreams and memories, and there is something profound at the level of the preverbal, infrarational feeling. But then, when Gabriel lights the candles around the mirror he bought for Gertrud so she could be reflected in something beautiful, her image enters its frame for only a moment; then they talk, and when they're done, she blows out the candles. No promises of infinity in art, but enough to get Gertrud to go to Paris with Axel.
Maybe artworks just bridle regret in a way that delays our decisions to change things. Or they give us something to look at besides other people. The open-endedness of this question mirrors this film's visual arc: approaching stylized pleasure, then withdrawing into a theatrical depiction of conversations.
At the end of the film, Gertrud is thirty years older and living alone. Axel stops by her home for a brief visit, and she tells him she regrets nothing--but she is sad. Amor omnia, but "love is unhappiness." He leaves, and the film ends on the closed door of her apartment. It leaves us where Gertrud's lovers were left, standing at a threshold at the end of a conversation that answered no questions. But there is, on the other hand, the strange texture of the lighting, the strange layout of Gertrud's home, the stool that sits next to her door as an intrusion from the material world. No answers, but surfaces.
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