Monthly Archives: February 2018

  • A Lesson in Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    En lektion i kärlek

    Ingmar Bergman (1954)

    At the start, the figures of a woman and two men in historical costume move jerkily on the revolving top of a music-box.   A voiceover with a knowing, self-satisfied tone invites the audience to enjoy ‘a comedy that might have been a tragedy’, secure in the knowledge that we are ‘grown ups’, comfortably immune to the foolish desires and insecurities of the people we’re going to see on screen.  In the final scene, a Cupid wanders into the frame and turns over the notice on the door of the hotel room that contains the protagonists, a middle-aged couple whose marriage was in trouble but who are now reconciled and drinking champagne together.  The ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign is reversed to ‘A Lesson in Love’.  All this makes Ingmar Bergman’s film sound deadly but most of the intervening ninety minutes offers an impressive flow of witty, combative dialogue – with well-matched combatants – and first-rate acting.  Perhaps best of all (and most surprising, in view of the bookending arch formality), several episodes break free of the constraints of romantic parable.  It’s as if the eye behind the camera becomes so thoroughly absorbed by what’s developing in these scenes that he forgets himself.   Its unmoored parts give A Lesson in Love a somewhat uneven structure but this, in the formal circumstances, is very welcome.

    After fifteen years of marriage, gynaecologist David Erneman (Gunnar Björnstrand) has an affair with one of his patients, the much younger Susanne (Yvonne Lombard), after she makes a pass at him (quite a strenuous pass, it must be said).  In return, David’s wife Marianne (Eva Dahlbeck) takes up again with old flame Carl-Adam (Åke Grönberg), a hearty, choleric sculptor.  He was set to marry Marianne until, on the day they were due to wed, she opted instead for their mutual friend David – a virtual seven-stone-weakling beside the appropriately rough-hewn, bulky Carl-Adam.  One of the amusements of A Lesson in Love is that it’s a little while after they’re first on screen together that we realise David and Marianne are husband and wife:  initially, they appear to be no more than passengers sharing the same train compartment.  (The Ernemans’ far from brief encounter seems to nod humorously to David Lean’s film – in the railway connection and the moment when Marianne gets something in her eye that David carefully dislodges.)  Marianne’s reversion sparks David’s jealousy and the central narrative concerns his efforts to wrest her from Carl-Adam for a second time.  His eventual success, after the necessary contortions, isn’t something that you feel Bergman really believes in but you’re grateful for it, nevertheless:  as a romantic comedy partnership, Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck are made for each other.  By pleasing retrospective coincidence, both actors, in real life, enjoyed a single, long-lasting marriage – Björnstrand’s for fifty-one years, Dahlbeck’s for sixty-three – that ended only in death.

    Bergman’s preoccupation with mortality comes through in one of the finest passages in A Lesson in Love – a flashback to a family gathering, shortly before the Ernemans’ marriage founders, for the birthday of David’s professor father Henrik (Olof Winnerstrand).  This cheerful septuagenarian reassures his anxious teenage granddaughter Nix (Harriet Andersson), David and Marianne’s elder child, that death is but a part of life.  The conversation takes place in Professor Erneman’s bedroom, after his wife Svea (Renée Björling), who treats him like a child, has insisted he change into long johns, even though it’s summer, for the traditional birthday picnic excursion about to begin.  ‘Think how dreary it would be,’ the professor tells Nix, ‘if everything were the same, always, always.  Therefore, there is death, so that there may come new life for all eternity.  Think only how tiresome it would be for me to wear long underdrawers a hundred thousand years’.  The down-to-earth conclusion to these weighty thoughts, beautifully delivered by Olof Winnerstrand, is a bit of light relief that Bergman himself may have needed (you don’t feel he believes in this calm apprehension of death either).  The episode is lovely and observant in other ways too.   Although Svea insists it’s Henrik who’s determined to maintain the usual birthday rituals, the evidence suggests that she’s the diehard traditionalist.  Henrik’s attempts, once he’s changed his underwear, to avoid an outing altogether misfire amusingly.  At the picnic venue, David and Marianne wander into the forest, where they lie down and, as the sun glitters through the trees, talk about their sharply contrasting dreams for the future:  she wants a third child, he to be a deep-sea diver in tropical oceans.

    Marianne is a conventional Bergman woman – fascinating to, but more grounded than, the male partner(s) who do her wrong.  Fortunately, Eva Dahlbeck combines effortless mystique with a temperamental force that really animates the character.  The two main male characters – the convulsive, chauvinist artist Carl-Adam and David, a more cerebral egoist – may express different sides of their creator.  Gunnar Björnstrand is a sublime comedian.  His David is an impulsive sensualist but emotionally tone-deaf too – a gynaecologist who, according to Susanne, knows nothing about women because he’s always looking at them from the wrong angle.  As he was to confirm in Smiles of a Summer Night the following year, Björnstrand can both be strongly romantic and appear, thanks to his straight-man looks and playing, exceptionally silly.  The prime example of the latter in A Lesson in Love comes when Carl-Adam, with typically aggressive larkiness, pulls down the brim of David’s hat and laughs at the result.  The incidental, intimate exchanges between David and Marianne, as played by Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck, are delightfully convincing.  Harriet Andersson has plenty of humour and wonderful physical freedom as their daughter – there’s no strain whatsoever in twenty-two-year-old Andersson’s portraying a girl of fourteen or so.  Nix is such a tomboy there’s even a reference to her having a sex-change operation – a joke, of course, in 1954.

    29 January 2018

  • All These Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

    För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor

    Ingmar Bergman (1964)

    For anyone fond of Ingmar Bergman’s mid-1950s comedies and regretful that he didn’t go on to make many more, All These Women is a comfort:  you come out thankful that Bergman majored in existential crisis.  The prologue gives a fair idea of what’s to follow.  Felix, a famous cellist, has died; the seven women in his life – and household – take turns to view the corpse.  All but the last pronounces Felix in death ‘so lifelike, yet so unlike himself’.   (The seventh woman has a dim punchline that begins ‘so deadlike …’)  In making her entrance, each member of the group defines her personality emphatically; she doesn’t reveal much that’s different during the rest of the film.  Once the main narrative – a series of extended flashbacks, summarising the last few days of the cellist’s life – is underway, the tone is firmly set.  The main character, in terms of screen time, is Cornelius (Jarl Kulle), Felix’s would-be biographer, who visits the maestro’s luxurious summer residence in the hope of securing an interview with the great man.  Cornelius never succeeds but suffers various sexual misadventures and humiliations during his time at the chateau.  The prologue is introduced and the subsequent action interspersed with waggish intertitles.  Jazzy arrangements of ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’ and ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’ on the soundtrack repeatedly proclaim the self-conscious jocularity of the enterprise.  Bergman and his cast are evidently having fun making this ‘madcap’ (that word alone in the BFI programme should have served as warning) comedy.  The audience watching it is not so lucky.

    In spite of the strenuous frivolity, All These Women qualifies as an act of self-expression on the writer-director’s part (though the screenplay credit, unusually, is shared – with Erland Josephson).  The master cellist is another of Bergman’s egocentric, libidinous artists:  ‘A genius acquires many widows’, says Jillker (Allan Edwall), Felix’s factotum, at the start of the film.  The maestro’s harem includes, as well as his official wife Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck), a collection of old flames and younger mistresses:  Madame Tussaud (Karen Kavli), Traviata (Gertrud Fridh), Cecilia (Mona Malm), Beatrice (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), Humlan aka Bumblebee (Bibi Andersson) and the housemaid Isolde (Harriet Andersson).  Except for Adelaide, all these names are Felix’s inventions – perhaps the women’s personas are largely his creation too.   While Felix remains unseen throughout, we learn that he has a doppelgänger in his dogsbody Tristan (Georg Funkqvist) – as if to suggest that one is master and the other menial thanks largely to chance.  The character of Cornelius is also personally meaningful to Bergman.  Cornelius is not only a useless biographer (he can’t get close to Felix the outer man, let alone the inner one):  he’s also a critic and a lesser musician.  Forcing these three satirical targets into a single character is a stretch; besides, Bergman, at this stage in his career, wasn’t best placed to deplore lack of sympathy on the part of critics, most of whom revered his work.  ‘Genius is making a critic change his mind’ is another epigram in the prologue.  I don’t know whether – and, if so, how – Bergman felt vindicated when most reviewers dismissed All These Women as a rare misfire.

    The tale appears to be set in the 1920s.  Sven Nykvist’s pastel palette, very easy on the eye, gives the opulent décor of the drawing rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms chez Felix a charming artificiality.  The settings, designed by P A Lundgren, and the costumes, by Mago, are gently amusing in a way the action never is.  Bergman loads the film with humorous business but business is all it is – pratfalls, a couple of speeded-up sequences, an outburst of fireworks, and so on.  Jarl Kulle is a gifted, highly resourceful comic actor but most of the ridiculous situations Cornelius gets into are tedious because they’re obviously designed to show off what Kulle’s capable of.  (A protracted sequence in which Cornelius accidentally dislodges a bust of Felix from its pedestal and struggles with it is a typical example.)   It’s instructive that the highlight of Kulle’s performance comes when Cornelius is too exhausted to amuse.  He’s been advised to wear women’s clothes to attract the attention of the sexually insatiable Felix but the plan naturally goes wrong.  At the end of his tether, Cornelius trudges up a staircase in his pink dress.  He then stands behind a chair containing the still invisible Felix and one of his concubines, and, deadly serious, tells the maestro there’ll be no biography and, therefore, no record for posterity of Felix’s greatness.  Though Bergman can’t still have himself in mind at this stage, he’s anxious to stress again the transience of artistic glory in the film’s epilogue:  immediately after the funeral, a penniless, good-looking young musician (Carl Billquist) arrives on the scene and takes up residence among Felix’s admiring widows.

    Among these, Harriet Andersson is by some way the most engaging, with her blend of mystery and naturalness and her lack of archness.  Eva Dahlbeck‘s droll, dignified Adelaide is mostly appealing too.  Bibi Andersson is remarkably annoying, possibly an unavoidable consequence of portraying a character called Bumblebee.  Even the title of this film is off.   It was originally released (and advertised at BFI) as Now About These Women – which sounds like an awkward translation but isn’t a literal one.  The original Swedish translates as Not to Mention All These Women – even worse.

    26 January 2018

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