The Passion of Anna
En passion
Ingmar Bergman (1969)
The film’s Swedish title translates simply as ‘A Passion’. In his Bergman biography, Peter Cowie explains how it acquired a different one for its American release: ‘Bergman had a single day in which to think of an acceptable alternative title when United Artists informed him that A Passion could not be used in the United States for copyright reasons. The Passion of Anna was Bergman’s choice. In fact, Andreas is far more at the centre of the drama than Anna …’ One possible explanation of Bergman’s hurried choice is that he and Liv Ullmann, who plays Anna, were a couple at the time the film was made: he may have felt, without much time for second thoughts, that the woman at the centre of his life must also be the centre of his art[1]. Of course, the prime mover isn’t really Anna or Andreas. Max von Sydow’s character is, as Cowie says, the protagonist but Andreas’s essential identity is virtually acknowledged in the film’s closing line, spoken by the voiceover narrator, who is also the writer-director: ‘This time his name was Andreas Winkelman’. The Passion of Anna, like so many of its forerunners and successors in the Bergman oeuvre, is ‘The Passion of Ingmar’.
Bergman was a master translator of his preoccupying anxieties into screen drama but the process feels unusually incomplete here. It may be no coincidence that (uniquely in his work, as far as I know) the narrative is punctuated by short interludes in which each of the four main actors – von Sydow, Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson – describes, in turn, their understanding of the person they’re playing. This seems almost a tacit admission on Bergman’s part that the characters are undeveloped in the story being told. A further peculiarity of these interludes is that, except for von Sydow, the actors give the impression, as they analyse their roles, of acting being themselves.
Following the break-up of his marriage, Andreas Winkelman lives alone on a sparsely populated island. His solitude is interrupted by the arrival in his life of the widowed Anna Fromm, who turns up one day at Andreas’s house with an urgent plea to use his telephone. He eavesdrops on her call and hears her distress. When Anna goes, she’s upset enough to leave her handbag behind. Andreas returns the bag but not before finding in it, and reading, a letter from Anna’s late husband, who was also named Andreas. He and the couple’s young son died in a car crash in which Anna was injured (she still walks with a stick though it chiefly signals persisting emotional damage). Anna is staying on the island with her married friends, Eva and Elis Vergerus, to whose house Andreas returns the bag. He accepts their invitation to dinner, where he once more meets Anna.
The main narrative describes Andreas’s developing relationship with each of the other three. As usual in Bergman, the surname Vergerus announces a chilly, negative personality and Elis (Erland Josephson), an architect and a prolific, obsessive amateur photographer, isn’t – or, at least, is no longer – a loving husband to the unhappy Eva (Bibi Andersson). While Elis is away from home, she spends time with Andreas and they end up having sex. The affair is short-lived; soon afterwards, Anna moves in to live with him. This partnership, companionable rather than physically passionate, continues for some months but Anna’s insistent idealisation of her life with the first Andreas wrecks her alliance with the second. The latter eventually reveals to Anna that he read the letter in her handbag, in which her husband warned that their marriage would encounter ‘new complications that in their turn will bring on terrible mental disturbances, as well as physical and mental acts of violence’. In the course of the film, Bergman repeatedly shows these words in emphatic close-up. They get inside the protagonist’s head and under his skin. His predecessor’s prophecy is realised in the demise of Andreas Winkelman’s own relationship with Anna.
Each one of the quartet often seems wearied by the pressure of personal failure or tragedy but this, as well as the emotional cruelty to which they sometimes subject each other, registers less strongly than the brutality of the world around them – a brutality both deliberately inflicted and natural. Someone (never identified) is killing animals on the island – slaughtering sheep, setting fire to a barn containing a horse and other livestock, hanging in a noose a dachshund puppy, which Andreas manages to rescue and adopt (before giving the friendly little dog to Eva as a kind of linus blanket). Andreas and Anna are shown at one point watching television news footage of Vietnam War atrocities. But no other creature, human or otherwise, is responsible for the ruinous damage done to a bird that flies into a window pane of Andreas’s house, and which he and Anna have no option but to finish off as kindly as they can.
Despite its dramatic limitations, the piece has some interesting and (at least at the time it first appeared) distinctive aspects. Like his two films of the previous year, Hour of the Wolf and Shame, The Passion of Anna was shot on Bergman’s island, Fårö. Unlike any previous Bergman, save for the aberration All These Women (1964), this one is in colour. (Sven Nykvist’s searching study of faces is as absorbing as ever. It’s hard to describe the close-ups as penetrating, though, since what’s going on behind the faces – or masks – tends to remain opaque.) Another new departure for Bergman is an extended improvisation – a dinner table conversation among the four principals. What’s more, it’s a strikingly coherent improvisation, thanks to the top-class actors and also, perhaps, the fact that, as Erland Josephson told Peter Cowie, ‘It was a kind of rehearsed improvisation … the evening before we had a dinner together where we tried it’. Even so, Josephson added, ‘it became a sort of spontaneous improvisation’.
In choosing the English title, Bergman may also have been recognising that Liv Ullmann gives the outstanding performance: volatile Anna’s numerous, startling mood shifts are always made to seem remarkably natural. The ending to the film sees Anna drive away, leaving Andreas alone once more. As the camera pulls out, he’s an increasingly small figure in the Fårö landscape. He seems undecided whether to follow Anna’s car or head in the opposite direction. He turns one way then the other, covering less distance each time before he turns. If he weren’t walking up and down in a straight line, he’d be moving in ever decreasing circles. On the soundtrack there’s a quietly ticking clock before the reading of the closing line. The finale crystallises one’s sense of the film as an arresting but fragmentary treatment of enduring Bergman themes.
7 April 2022
[1] For the record … only three Bergman films have titles that include characters’ names, all of them those of women or children (Summer with Monika, The Passion of Anna, Fanny and Alexander). Two more titles refer to a group of women (Waiting Women, All These Women), none to men.