The Devil’s Eye
Djävulens öga
Ingmar Bergman (1960)
The words of an Irish proverb – ‘A young woman’s chastity is a stye in the devil’s eye’ – and a Scarlatti sonata for harpsichord introduce Bergman’s comic ‘rondo capriccioso’. The source, according to Peter Cowie’s biography of Bergman, was ‘a somewhat elderly Danish radio play, Don Juan Returns, written by Oluf Bang’, which Bergman found in Svensk Filmindustri archives. Cowie suggests he was drawn to the material out of a ‘desire to place on film some elements of his enjoyable staging of Molière’s Don Juan at Malmö in 1955’. The film’s basic conceit has Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) dispatched by the Devil (Stig Järrel) from Hell into the world above to deflower Britt-Marie (Bibi Andersson), the daughter of a rural clergyman (Nils Poppe), in order to cure the Satanic eye complaint. Don Juan, whose infernal punishment is to be forever denied sex just as the woman he’s seducing is ready for it, accepts the assignment enthusiastically but things don’t go according to plan. Britt-Marie brings out a romantic vulnerability on the part of the great lover; she admits to feeling pity, rather than desire, for him. They go through the preliminaries but the relationship isn’t consummated. Only after Don Juan has returned to Hell, mission unaccomplished, does the Devil’s stye disappear – thanks to the lie Britt-Marie tells her fiancé Jonas (Axel Düberg), when she assures him she’s never been kissed by another man.
This breezily cynical jeu d’esprit is inventive, with some nice theatrical flourishes. It’s seldom irritating in the self-consciously waggish style of Bergman’s next comedy, All These Women (1964). His script includes plenty of clever, epigrammatic exchanges about the nature of love, the moral shortcomings of Heaven as well as Hell, the relative superiority of human life to post-mortem existence in either location. There are nice reversals: while Don Juan reveals a surprising weakness, Britt-Marie’s father proves more cunning than his naïve, holy fool persona leads us to expect. Yet the film never quite coheres. At this stage of his career, Bergman was creating heavy (major) dramatic works at an astounding rate – he may well have felt the need for an occasional burst of light relief. Whatever the reason, The Devil’s Eye (sandwiched between The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly in the canon) has a sketchy feel. The mismatch between the introductory proverb and the eventual stye cure is typical of this: since, as she admits to him, Britt-Marie has kissed other men before Don Juan, he seems surplus to requirements for the final whopper to Jonas. The story amounts to a (qualified) vindication of marriage that makes a change from plenty of other pieces in the Bergman oeuvre. You wonder, though, if this is genuine optimism – or a matter of convenience in tying up the plot.
A more persistent trait of the film is its half-hearted modernisation. The story is narrated by a character listed as ‘the actor’ (an expertly arch Gunnar Björnstrand): this affable, slightly pedantic figure in a suit and tie starts by explaining the geography of Hell with a map and pointer. When the action switches to the abode of the damned, Satan too appears in modern office clothes – a hint that he keeps himself up to date. Don Juan’s changes of outfit in the early stages – from doublet and hose to dressing robe to pullover and trousers for his earthly visit – are pleasing. It’s a relief that Britt-Marie isn’t an obvious country girl innocent: dressed in a blouse and slacks, she’s painting and decorating when she first meets Don Juan and gives him a tour of the all-mod-cons home she and Jonas will share when they’re married. There’s mild amusement in the revelation that the fiancé, when he arrives to join Britt-Marie’s family at dinner, is a petulant nerd. After their initial impact, though, none of these elements is much developed. Nils Poppe gives a charming, funny performance as the clergyman (especially when he goes to bed to read and say his prayers: he takes about ten seconds to do both before falling asleep) but his character could be from a bygone era – Bergman doesn’t get much out of placing him in the mid-twentieth century. By the end of The Devil’s Eye, Britt-Marie too, in spite of her appearance, might as well be a more traditional figure.
Bibi Andersson was in her mid-twenties at the time and looks it. She immediately – and therefore disappointingly – suggests there’s more to Britt-Marie than meets the eye in terms of worldly experience and savoir-faire. Jarl Kulle is splendid in Hell but wears the same masklike face out of it. Don Juan’s melancholy awareness of his eternal fate is occasionally poignant but the viewer’s awareness, from his other Bergman roles, of Kulle’s comic resource and vividness makes it frustrating to watch him here. (If Bergman had given Kulle rather more to do in The Devil’s Eye and rather less to do in All These Women, both performances might have been better.) There’s not much connection between Kulle and Andersson: the supposedly central relationship is often upstaged by the persistent but eventually unavailing attempts of Don Juan’s servant Pablo (Sture Lagerwall) to seduce Renata (Gertrud Fridh), the clergyman’s wife and Britt-Marie’s mother. The excellent Sture Lagerwall has a great face: it’s surprising he didn’t feature in more Bergman films. Don Juan’s and Pablo’s excursion is supervised by a demon (Ragnar Arvedson) who repeatedly metamorphoses into a black cat and back again. Bergman keeps switching because he knows neither incarnation works on its own. (The Devil’s Eye provided a near-first when this viewer got bored with feline antics.) Allan Edwall makes a more entertaining appearance as a devil on the party’s return to Hell.
23 March 2018