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
