Old Yorker

  • Searching for Ingmar Bergman

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Margarethe von Trotta (2018)

    In January 1960 Margarethe von Trotta, born in Berlin and raised in Düsseldorf, felt she was suffocating in West Germany and moved to Paris.  The French New Wave was gathering momentum but it was seeing The Seventh Seal in Paris that made von Trotta realise she wanted to make films.  After working as an actress for some years, she first moved behind the camera with The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), co-written and co-directed with her then husband Volker Schlöndorff.  Many cinema and television pieces later, this is von Trotta’s first feature documentary and the second such piece in the space of a few months (following Jane Magnusson’s Bergman – A Year in a Life) to explore the personality, work and legacy of Ingmar Bergman.

    Von Trotta’s opening contributors include Liv Ullmann and Gunnel Lindblom, who talk about Bergman’s working methods with actors:  his instruction ‘Allow me to see that you have understood’, quoted by Ullmann, registers particularly strongly.  Searching for Ingmar Bergman then goes on to juxtapose, to rather mystifying effect, extracts from Bergman films and interviews with esteemed directors and writers – a couple of them prone to high-sounding generalisations that von Trotta’s selection of excerpts seems almost designed to expose as such.   Jean-Claude Carrière declares that a core preoccupation is ‘the religious concept of guilt’ until God gradually disappears from Bergman’s world.  A clip of Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika reminds us that neither guilt nor God has much of a role in that celebrated early work.  Carlos Saura praises Bergman’s actresses, in creating their characters, for managing ‘the difficult balance between taking a religious position, an almost mystical position, and being an object of sexual desire’.  Von Trotta then puts on the screen one of the many exceptions to this type, Liv Ullmann’s Alma in Hour of the Wolf (and, later on, arguably the outstanding exception:  Ingrid Thulin’s Märta in Winter Light – in the gruelling scene in which Gunnar Björnstrand’s pastor scorns her).  We see von Trotta during conversation with these talking heads and there’s nothing in her visible or verbal reactions to suggest that she disagrees with what they’re saying.  Yet she proves it’s an oversimplification.

    Her film goes up a revelatory level thanks to an interview with Bergman’s youngest son Daniel.  Now in his mid-fifties, he starts by recalling the tricky collaboration with his father on Sunday’s Children (1990), which Ingmar wrote and Daniel directed.  He moves on to describe, with candour but no rancour, the limits of their relationship away from the film set.  He admits that he doesn’t miss either of his late parents, whom he always thinks of as Ingmar and Käbi (Käbi Laterei, Ingmar’s fourth wife) rather than as father and mother.  Although he can’t feign distress about this, Daniel says he’d be horrified if his own child came to feel the same way about him.  He and his half-brother Ingmar Jr (a retired airline captain) recall the family celebrations of his father’s sixtieth birthday in 1978:  this was the first time most of Ingmar’s nine children had met each other.  (The gathering was at the insistence of Ingmar’s fifth and last wife, Ingrid.)  Daniel also remembers a conversation with his father in old age, when Ingmar, in self-pitying mood, lamented how much he missed his actors.  A half-sister of Daniel’s, also present and exasperated, said she wished Ingmar could say, just once, he missed seeing his real children and grandchildren.  ‘But I don’t’, her father replied.

    Once she’s talked with Daniel, von Trotta is confronting the perennial dilemma of the Ingmar Bergman biographer – how to balance praise for his artistic achievement with censure of his personal conduct, in both his professional and private lives.  Unlike Jane Magnusson, von Trotta doesn’t start piling up evidence for the prosecution before reverting to hagiography.  The best of her interviewees give balanced accounts of their experiences of Bergman, especially the film producer Katinka Faragó.  In the mid-1950s, he was getting through script girls even more quickly than he was wives.   Faragó’s longevity was extraordinary:  she first worked with Bergman in script supervisor/continuity clerk roles on Dreams and Smiles of a Summer Night (both 1955), the start of a thirty-year partnership.  Two of her most striking comments give a flavour of her unblinkered perceptions.  She says that Bergman ‘had a method, “Never argue with an actor.”   So he took it out on other people on the set’.  But she doesn’t believe he was an outsize ego:  ‘He never thought that he was good enough’.

    The crucial importance of her time in Paris and her subsequent career in Germany may explain why von Trotta chooses to have several French perspectives as part of her ‘search’ (Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve as well as Jean-Claude Carrière) and to devote what seems disproportionate screen time to the fruits of Bergman’s exile in West Germany.   Liv Ullmann mentions early on his desire to be remembered as a playwright:  discussion of his work for theatre is limited almost entirely to the programme of plays he staged while in Germany (adaptations of A Doll’s House and Miss Julie and of his own Scenes from a Marriage).   A case is made, albeit by a Swede, that From the Life of the Marionettes, made in Germany and in German, is an especially underrated part of the Bergman oeuvre.

    The Swede in question is Stig Björkman and he has interesting things to say, especially about the ageing gay character in From the Life of the Marionettes, who describes himself as ‘an infantile old codger’.  The phrase has considerable resonance with an emerging theme of von Trotta’s film and might be taken to refer to Bergman himself:  we’re told that he always remained a child at heart, that this was why he was such an exceptional director of child actors, that it may explain also the mutually unsatisfying relationships between him and his own children, that he refused psychotherapy which would have helped him to ‘grow up’ but, as a result, threatened his continuing creativity.  It’s another of his compatriots, Ruben Östlund (the man behind two conspicuously overrated films of recent years:  Force Majeure and The Square), who delivers the most bizarre remark in this documentary.  Östlund maintains that Bergman didn’t snobbishly regard highbrow and lowbrow drama as incompatible – unlike, says Östlund, most present-day arthouse film-makers.  To illustrate the point, he suggests that Scenes from a Marriage was influenced by Dallas.  It’s true the former has been described as high-class soap opera.  It’s also true that Scenes from a Marriage was first screened on television in 1973 and Dallas in 1978[1].

    Ruben Östlund deserves thanks, though, for taking the opportunity to ask Margarethe von Trotta what is her own favourite Bergman film.  He doesn’t get an answer:  she merely reiterates that The Seventh Seal, though not her favourite, is the one that changed the course of her life.  This is a significant moment in Searching for Ingmar Bergman because it points up how little von Trotta explains the quest of her title.  She gives the impression that she decided to make this documentary purely because Bergman named one of her films, The German Sisters, as one of his greatest favourites.  It’s not as if she knows him only through his work and wants to hear from people who knew the man:  she describes a visit he paid her and Volker Schlöndorff at their home in Munich.  At the start, she runs the opening sequences of The Seventh Seal and supplies an excellent voiceover summary of what is shown in them.  For the most part, though, von Trotta is a listener:  a most attentive one (and her keen blue eyes magnetise the camera) but I wish she’d said more in response.  I much prefer her film to Jane Magnusson’s but it leaves you unsure what it’s aiming to do – beyond presenting another collection of material fascinating to us Bergmaniacs who can’t get enough of him.

    11 May 2019

    [1] To be precise, what Östlund says is that Bergman ‘was inspired on Dallas [sic]’.  David Jacobs, creator of the latter, has acknowledged that Scenes from a Marriage, bizarre though this sounds too, gave him the idea that became the Ewing family saga.  Some reviewers of Searching for Ingmar Bergman have assumed this is what Östlund is referring to.  Although it might seem possible from the single phrase ‘inspired on Dallas’ that they’re right and this is merely a semi-slip of the tongue, there’s little doubt from the context of what Östlund says that he sees the influence as the other way round:  ‘When he did Scenes from a Marriage, he was inspired on Dallas ­– you know, this TV soap series and he had a way of combining like the arthouse cinema and a very commercial American industry and he didn’t see any problem with that’.

     

  • Rogue Male (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Clive Donner (1976)

    Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, first published in May 1939, has been adapted twice for the screen:  in Man Hunt, a Hollywood film of 1941, directed by Fritz Lang; subsequently in this Clive Donner version, made for television and first screened on BBC in September 1976.  It was shown at the following year’s Toronto Film Festival and, says Wikipedia, ‘was regarded by the BBC as being suitable for a cinema release internationally’.  The reason this didn’t happen, according to the same source, was that it ‘had the potential to cause legal and industrial problems in the UK, because the crew had not been paid at the rate applicable to cinema releases’.  Now Donner’s film has been produced as a BFI DVD and issued as the latest quarterly DVD freebie for BFI Champion members, which is how I came by it.

    Household’s protagonist is an Englishman, a sportsman and a gentleman.  While travelling on the continent, he visits a country governed by a totalitarian regime, tracks down its dictator, and gets him in the sights of his rifle.  He tells himself he has sought out the potential quarry for the thrill of the chase and without intending to pull the trigger.  Members of the regime’s secret service, after arresting the Englishman, torture him, throw him from a cliff and leave him for dead.  He survives and, with the help of a civilian who is also a good sport, escapes to a seaport.  He stows away on a British ship and returns to England.  In London, he realises the dictator’s men are still on his trail.  He kills one of them, following a chase on the London underground, then finds himself pursued not only by the remaining agents but also by the British police for murder.  He goes underground again – literally so, in a hide in rural Dorset.  With time to reflect, he admits to himself that he did mean, as revenge for the execution of his fiancée by the totalitarian regime, to assassinate the dictator.  The protagonist now constructs a makeshift catapult with which, from within the bolt hole, he kills his chief pursuer – a compatriot in cahoots with the foreign dictatorship.  The hero takes this fifth columnist’s car, money and identification papers, drives to Liverpool and boards a ship bound for Tangier.  He begins to plan a second stalk of the dictator.

    Reviewing the new DVD of Rogue Male in Sight & Sound (March 2019), Robert Hanks situates Geoffrey Household’s novel within a strain of adventure-thriller fiction of the interwar period.  Household, says Hanks, ‘shares with [Eric] Ambler a distaste for fascism and an outraged sense that sides must be taken, and with [John] Buchan a deep Toryism and passion for the English countryside, not just as landscape but as the basis for a quasi-feudal social order whose passing is to be deplored’.  (Wikipedia’s biographical summary of Household endorses this interpretation, at least in the information that ‘After the [Second World] War, he lived the life of a country gentleman’.)  The English traitor in the novel is called Quive-Smith but the hero, the foreign country and its dictator are all unnamed.  In an interview with Radio Times for the broadcast of Donner’s film in 1976, Household was quoted as follows:

    ‘Although the idea for Rogue Male germinated from my intense dislike of Hitler, I did not actually name him in the book as things were a bit tricky at the time and I thought I would leave it open so that the target could be either Hitler or Stalin. You could take your pick.’

    To say ‘things were a bit tricky at the time’ is quite an understatement.  Even with a nameless arch-enemy, the novel seems, in retrospect, an urgent and a daring piece of work – published, as it was, only a few months before Britain was at war with Germany.

    Retrospect is perhaps the fundamental problem with Clive Donner’s disappointing film of the book.  Distance in time lends smugness to the view.  Frederic Raphael’s script includes an explanation of the novel’s title (a rogue male elephant separates from the herd and roams viciously alone); Household’s other animal and man-as-beast metaphors (going to ground, running to earth, etc) remain salient.  Yet the film often seems set in quotation marks, with a surfeit of caricatural acting and music by Christopher Gunning that suggests not just pastiche but tongue-in-cheek pastiche.  Even though the story is still eventful and moderately exciting, the screenplay undersells the source material’s ripping yarn aspect in favour of skewering the English class system.

    The apparent casting coup was getting Peter O’Toole for the lead – the hunted huntsman, now called … Sir Robert Hunter.  O’Toole’s aristocratic accent is amusing for a while and he does inventive things – though maybe that should be overdoes.   You get the increasing impression that his priority is to deliver lines quirkily, even if that means losing the sense of them.   Overall, O’Toole is so individual that it’s hard to get a handle on how unconventional Hunter is meant to be, and well nigh impossible to see him as representative of a type.  Although he has competitors in the cast, the star takes the prize for looking most out of period thanks to overlong hair.  You’re bound to wonder if Peter O’Toole refused a trim and Clive Donner was too grateful to have him to argue.

    The real casting coup is Alastair Sim because this proved to be his last performance:  he died a few weeks before the transmission of Rogue Male.  He plays ‘the Earl’, Hunter’s uncle, whose vague manner belies a clear understanding of his own best interests.  The Earl starts off a firm supporter of Neville Chamberlain; by the end, he’s a Churchill man through and through.   It isn’t vintage Sim but his natural eccentricity serves him well, enabling him to avoid the deliberate lampooning style of, for example, John Standing as Quive-Smith and Harold Pinter as Hunter’s  lawyer.

    It might have helped to give the audience its bearings by briefly introducing the protagonist in England, taking pleasure on the hunting field in easier times.  As it is, Donner and Raphael launch straight into the main action.  Place and time are announced as ‘Germany, Early 1939’.  The dark corpses of birds crash to the ground in close-up and the men bringing them down are Germans.  Ashen-faced Hunter isn’t part of the shoot but watches on the edge of woodland, some distance from the sounds of gunfire.  When we next see him, he’s training his rifle on a social gathering that includes Hitler.  The juxtaposition of sequences shows Hunter as a marksman on a mission but fails to imply he’s a man who got to know a gun by shooting for ‘sport’.

    It’s all the more frustrating that the film doesn’t set Hunter in his natural environment when it does rely on flashbacks to his doomed romance with Rebecca (Cyd Hyman).   These inserts are so feeble they’re spoof-like – they don’t have anything like the weight to suggest that the memory of Rebecca and what Nazi Germany did to her is what impels Hunter to action.   The historical circumstances inevitably point up the Jewish flavour of the name Rebecca, which naturally makes you wonder if Sir Robert Hunter is not just anti-fascist but sufficiently free of the prejudices of his class and era to fall in love with a Jewess.  It seems an important point but it’s one that the director and screenwriter, Jewish themselves, don’t trouble to explore further.

    6 May 2019

     

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