To Joy
Till glädje
Ingmar Bergman (1950)
It starts with an orchestra rehearsal of the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, from which the film takes its title. One of the orchestra’s violinists, Stig Eriksson (Stig Olin), leaves the rehearsal to take an urgent phone call. We know before Stig does – from the shocked expression of the man who first answers the phone, from the sound of crying issuing from the receiver that the man puts down while he goes to fetch Stig – that it’s bad news. We soon learn that Stig’s wife Marta (Maj-Britt Nilssen) has died as the result of a domestic accident, the explosion of a paraffin stove, which also injures the couple’s young daughter (Berit Holmström). The chasm between the ineffable quality of the Beethoven music – what the orchestra’s conductor Sönderby (Victor Sjöström) later calls ‘a joy beyond comprehension’ – and the defined, implacable human tragedy that has occurred supplies a fiercely dramatic opening to this early Bergman. The foreknowledge of how Stig’s life with Marta will end shadows the whole film, which proceeds to tell in flashback the story of their time together.
To Joy prefigures both a particular later Bergman film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and a recurring theme of his work – a male protagonist behaving badly and seeming to be unworthy of a devoted woman. The timeframe of Stig’s and Marta’s relationship, seven years between their first meeting and her death, is much shorter than the one in Scenes from a Marriage (To Joy, at ninety-eight minutes, is little more than half the length of the theatrical release version of the later film). It’s long enough, even so, for the couple to have two children and for their marriage to founder: they’ve been reconciled and are starting over only shortly before Marta dies. They first get together as new members (Marta, née Olsson, the only woman member) of the Hälsingborg symphony orchestra in which both play violin. Although the tensions in the marriage derive from Stig’s strong, thwarted ambition to become a soloist, his egotism and insecurity lead him into more aggressively destructive actions: he commits adultery with the unhappily married Nelly Bro (Margit Carlqvist); in one shocking sequence, he hits Marta repeatedly and gives her a bloody nose.
Bergman’s script is rich in convincing detail, some of it startling. As Marta packs for her trip to their country cottage with the children, Stig is puzzled by a large box and asks, ‘You got a bomb in there?’ Marta explains that the box contains a new paraffin stove. Other, relatively inconsequential details give the couple’s relationship an individual reality and humour. Marta tells Stig, as he stands on the station platform waiting for the train taking her and the children to the country to depart, that he needs a haircut. He pooh-poohs the suggestion and reminds her he hates going to the barber – ‘Hair all over the place’. An episode in which Sönderby describes, in voiceover, a visit to the couple, to whom he becomes a kind of father figure, is narratively jarring – this is the only point where Sönderby is the storyteller. But his description of observing the interactions between Marta and Stig through their glances and quiet words, and the changes of mood these can effect, chimes with what the viewer has seen of them together, when things are going well. The limitation of To Joy is that, in spite of the fine detail, the overall structure feels forced. An obvious explanation for this – obvious, at least, at this distance in time – is the autobiographical basis of the piece. Not for the last time, the man behaving badly in a Bergman film is the writer-director’s alter ego.
In The Ingmar Bergman Archives published by Taschen in 2008, Bergman acknowledged that:
‘The film … was to be about a couple of young musicians in the symphony orchestra in Hälsingborg, the disguise almost a formality. It was about Ellen [Lundström] and me, about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity.’
Bergman’s five-year marriage to Ellen Lundström, his second wife, ended in 1950, the year in which To Joy appeared in cinemas. The driven, self-doubting but self-centred interpretative artist on screen represents the driven, self-doubting but self-centred creative artist behind the camera – and, as Bergman implies in the quote above, too blatantly. The confessional imperative results in a portrait not just of a marriage going wrong but of its going wrong thanks partly to the failure of another marriage, the one between the gloomy temptress Nelly and the actor Mikael Bro (John Ekman) – as if marriage is bound to fail. The beautiful, dignified Marta is long-suffering in her relationship with Stig; perhaps she knows what she’s in for, with one failed marriage already behind her. Stig’s shallow, good-looking friend Marcel (Birger Malmsten), a cellist in the orchestra, has love affairs but is unmarried and may be To Joy‘s most untroubled character. His only rival is the orchestra conductor, evidently married to his job. The strength of Bergman’s desire for his own marriages to work out better than they had so far done is perhaps what propels Stig’s and Marta’s somewhat unconvincing reconciliation – though this is also required to give full impact to the eventual tragedy.
The scene in which Sönderby visits Stig and Marta at their cottage anticipates Bergman’s later, more expansive descriptions of the beauties of Swedish summer (in Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries, for example). The contrast between outdoor freedom and behind-closed-doors constraints is simple but eloquently expressed in Gunnar Fischer’s camerawork and lighting. The film contains moments of marvellous emotional acuity and originality. When Sönderby arrives at the cottage, the front door is slightly open; he pushes it to see the couple inside, blissfully happy in each other’s company. Sönderby, so as not to detract from the perfection of what he’s seen, withdraws and knocks on the door, to begin the process of a different moment. Another telephone interruption to orchestra rehearsal inevitably evokes the one with which the film opens but is transformed by the humorous piece of choreography that follows. Stig has been called with the news of the birth of his and Marta’s first child. As he resumes his seat in the orchestra, Sönderby, annoyed, asks the violinist at the front to demand an explanation of Stig’s absence: a pass-it-on message goes down the line to Stig. His good news returns by the same route to Sönderby, who instantly beams congratulations in Stig’s direction and shifts into an excited, celebratory conducting style. There’s the odd hackneyed element too, though. Bergman overuses a toy bear that Stig buys for Marta as a birthday present at the start of their relationship – and Stig Olin mistimes Stig’s noticing the bear in the cottage after Marta’s death: he reacts before he’s had chance to see it.
Bergman’s use of classical music, in the orchestra’s rehearsals or performances, is designed, for the most part, to repeat the effect he achieves in the opening apposition of Beethoven’s ninth and the phone call. In other words, he contrasts the grandeur of the music with the difficulties and shortcomings of the people who make it. Virtually the only instance of the two things in combination occurs when Stig makes a mess of a violin solo. This persistent contrast and the implied uplift of the music, which includes Mendelssohn and Mozart as well as Beethoven, pays diminishing returns, though it’s interesting as another expression of Bergman’s compulsions: the music may have improved his own morale. The film ends, as it began, with the ninth symphony, as the bereaved Stig returns to play in the orchestra and his little son (Björn Montin) watches from a seat in the front row of an otherwise empty auditorium. The boy’s inscrutable expression and the fact that his legs are way too short for his feet to touch the ground redeem what might otherwise have been an overly sentimental conclusion. The cast is strong: it’s a considerable help that Stig Olin (Lena’s father) has an eccentric spirit that makes Bergman’s portrait of the artist as an egocentric bastard less harsh than it might otherwise be – and enables you to believe that Marta, whom Maj-Britt Nilsson plays with great feeling, might have fallen in love with him. Victor Sjöström gives Sönderby a blend of irascible gusto and quiet perspicacity that’s greatly engaging.
2 January 2018