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
