Old Yorker

  • It Rains on Our Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Det regnar på vår kärlek

    Ingmar Bergman (1946)

    At first, the title is literal.  The lovers David (Birger Malmsten) and Maggi (Barbro Kollberg) repeatedly dodge downpours or get drenched.  As the film goes on, the couple struggle against metaphorical adverse weather – a combination of misfortune and, especially, the rules and prejudices of a bourgeois, bureaucratic society.   David has recently been released from prison.  Maggi wanted to be an actress but has got herself pregnant, by whom she’s not sure, and plans to start a new life in a provincial town.   She and David first bump into each other at a train station in Stockholm.  They’re soon sharing a railway carriage, then a Salvation Army hostel room for the night, then taking shelter from torrential rain in a cottage that becomes a key location in the story.  The film is introduced by a pleasant-faced man of around sixty (Gösta Cederlund), who emerges from beneath a large black umbrella.  He says he realises we want to know what he’s doing in the film and who he is.  He’s about to identify himself but doesn’t want to hold up proceedings:  ‘Here comes one of the main characters’, he says, as Maggi enters the frame and he disappears.  By the end of It Rains on Our Love, the audience still doesn’t know the man’s name but we recognise him as a force for good.  He acts as defence counsel, in the story’s dramatic climax, when David stands trial for assaulting Mr Purman (Gunnar Björnstrand), the pettifogging official who attempts to evict the couple from their cottage.  After the trial, which ends in acquittal, the couple meet the mystery man again as they set out on the road to a fresh start.  He warns that rain’s on the way and, before he bicycles away, offers his umbrella, which they gratefully accept.  David and Maggi wonder who the man was.  ‘Maybe an angel?’ suggests Maggi.

    Her remark elicits a little laugh from David that seems to say, ‘What a daft idea’.  You can almost hear the echo of an identical laugh from Ingmar Bergman:  ‘I know – but I couldn’t think of a better one for now’.  Like its predecessor Crisis, this film, his second feature, is not an original screenplay:  Bergman and Herbert Grevenius adapted a stage play, Bra Mennesker (Good People), by the Norwegian Oskar Braaten.  Crisis and It Rains on Our Love were released in Sweden only a few months apart but the later film is more stylistically ambitious – and less satisfying, from the self-conscious introduction onwards.  (Bergman also occasionally inserts title cards that comment archly on the action.)  The film is at pains to celebrate free spirits.  As well as the main couple, there’s an elderly widow (Julia Cæsar), hatchet-faced and stentorian, but, as she confirms at the trial, honest and open-minded.  There’s a mongrel that attaches itself early on to Maggi and David and stays with them to the end – it’s appealing, even though, hanging around the ex-con and the fallen woman, it serves a symbolic give-a-dog-a-bad-name purpose.  There are, alas, a pair of mischief-making comedy pedlars (Sture Ericson and Ulf Johansson), who keep turning up.  The one who does bits of annoying business with balloons (Johansson) puts you on the side of the film’s conformist forces:  they should lock him up and throw away the key.

    The umbrella man has a malign counterpart in Håkansson (Ludde Gentzel), who signs his cottage over to David, knowing full well that the land on which it stands has been acquired by the local authorities for development.  Bergman tries to integrate the romantic, whimsical side of the story with straight-faced political comment but the latter aspect lacks conviction in more ways than one.  Although she’s not charged with a crime, Maggi, as well as David, has to answer for her past conduct at the trial, under harsh questioning from the hugely horrible prosecutor (Benkt-Åke Benktsson).  But since the judge (Erik Rosén) eventually acquits them both – even though David did bop Purman – it seems the powers-that-be aren’t as outrageously unfair as all that.

    The two leads are likeable, though they lack the presence of the leading lights of the Bergman repertory company that emerged in the years ahead.  Barbro Kollberg, who didn’t become part of that company, has somehow old-fashioned, almost silent-movie looks.  Her most striking moment – which is also one of the few moments that registers as authentic Bergman – comes when Maggi loses her baby:  she asks, in an anguished but hollow tone, where what was alive inside her has gone.  Birger Malmsten, who made several more films with the director (the last was Face to Face, almost thirty years later), is physically and emotionally fluid.  In terms of the cast, however, It Rains on Our Love is remarkable chiefly for the debut in a Bergman-directed film of Gunnar Björnstrand.  Even in his short appearance as Mr Purman, quivering first with smug rectitude, then with pusillanimity, Björnstrand just about steals the show.

    17 February 2018

  • Journey’s End

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Saul Dibb (2017)

    R C Sherriff’s famous trench warfare drama was first performed in London in 1928 (with a cast that included a twenty-one-year-old Laurence Olivier).  Since then, it’s been repeatedly revived on stage and twice adapted for television.  The first cinema version of Journey’s End, directed by James Whale, appeared in 1930 and a German remake, Die andere Seite, the following year.   According to Wikipedia, there hasn’t been another since, until Saul Dibb’s film, whose release coincides with the centenary of the events on which Sherriff’s play is based.  The action of Journey’s End spans four days – 18-21 March 1918 – leading up to the launch of the Germans’ ‘Spring Offensive’.  Dibb’s version premiered at the Toronto festival in September 2017; it’s a little surprising that its UK release in cinemas hasn’t been synchronised exactly with the Spring Offensive’s hundredth anniversary.   Journey’s End would have faced significantly less box-office competition in the third week of March than it did in early February, when major awards contenders were appearing.

    Sherriff’s Journey’s End takes place entirely within a British officer’s dugout; the warfare going on above ground is suggested by sound and lighting.  Working with a screenplay by Simon Reade, Dibbs opens out the action a bit.  The fresh-faced, naïve young officer Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), newly arrived in France, call on his military top-brass uncle (Rupert Wickham), with a request to be assigned to a particular company.  This is headed by Captain Stanhope, whom Raleigh knew (and hero-worshipped) at school and who is now in a relationship with Raleigh’s sister, Margaret.  In the film’s closing scene, after Raleigh’s death in action, Margaret (Rose Reade) receives and reads a letter from her brother – an optimistic description of his arrival in France and first impressions of army life.   He also assures his sister that Stanhope is held in universally high regard:  the viewer not only knows that Raleigh is now dead but has also seen what a troubled character Stanhope (Sam Claflin) really is – or has become in the trenches.  This one scene in England supplies a quietly trenchant conclusion to the film.  Dibb returns to France for the very last shot – a panoramic overhead view of the trenches, accompanied by text on the screen that summarises the huge numbers of casualties still to come before the November 1918 armistice:  this too is effective.  (Saul Dibb’s restraint in use of the Olympian overhead compares favourably with Joe Wright’s direction of Darkest Hour.)   The most important opening out consists of the addition of brief bursts of warfare, when men from Stanhope’s company go over the top, usually to their death.  This gives an added edge to the claustrophobia of the candelit dugout:  getting out into the open means getting into mortal peril.

    The film also expands the play’s cast of ten characters but the no-frills narrative strongly implies that Dibb wants to commemorate Sherriff’s original rather than use it as a point of departure.  In a similar spirit, the  cast – which also includes Paul Bettany, Robert Glenister, Stephen Graham, Toby Jones, Miles Jupp and Tom Sturridge – all give capable and committed performances.  There’s a downside to this approach, though:  most of the actors are self-consciously respectful of the gravity of the play’s themes, and acting a shade evidently.  You sense too, in the source material, a problem familiar in middle-class plays of this vintage.  Sherriff (1896-1975) served as an officer in the Great War, fighting at Vimy Ridge, Loos and Passchendaele, where he was seriously injured.   A sense that the non-posh characters are simpler souls than the ones who speak RP English hangs heavy in the air.  It’s fortunate for this limited but creditable film that the two characters in question – the company’s erratic cook Private Mason (Cockney) and Second Lieutenant Trotter (Northern accent), commissioned from the ranks and fond of his grub – are played by the two best actors.  Thanks to Toby Jones (Mason) and Stephen Graham (Trotter), the lower orders come over as the most fully believable men in the company.

    15 February 2018

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