Old Yorker

  • All These Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • A Star Is Born (1976)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Frank Pierson (1976)

    I don’t usually return to films I walked out of.  Keen to compare the 1976 A Star Is Born with the 1954 one, I made an exception.  I feel I did George Cukor and Judy Garland an injustice in the note I wrote earlier this month.  Cukor’s film, half an hour longer than this remake, is turgid but it never occurred to me to leave it early (and I watched it straight after seeing another film on the same day).   The Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born – surely the only way to describe it, though Frank Pierson was nominally the director – has now attained unique status in my cinema-going history.  It’s the only film I’ve walked out of twice.

    I don’t remember why I exited forty years ago – at least this time I can record the reasons.  First, there was a bad smell close to where I was in NFT2.  I’m nearly certain it was the feet of the BFI usher who took a seat and his shoes off just behind me – not the fault of the film of course, though a better one might have distracted my nostrils.  The setting of A Star Is Born in this version has switched from Hollywood to the music business and the self-destructive leading man is now a hell-raising rock star, instead of a matinee idol on the skids.  Whereas the Cukor film didn’t show James Mason’s Norman Maine acting on screen, there’s no such luck with John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson).  The hour that I lasted included lots of his boring music.  Worse than the smell and the noise, however, and the main reason for walking, was Barbra Streisand.

    This isn’t an unusual objection to the film.  Streisand’s allegedly high-handed behaviour during the development and making of it guaranteed exceptionally bad advance press.  By the time it opened in the US in December 1976, Frank Pierson had virtually disowned A Star Is Born (as had Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, with whom Pierson wrote the screenplay).  Streisand had initially wanted her then-boyfriend, hairdresser-to-the-stars Jon Peters, to direct.  When that didn’t happen (Peters eventually shared the producing credit with her), Streisand, according to Pierson, constantly interfered and took over the direction when she felt like it.  Many of the negative reviews the film received when it finally appeared majored on how thoroughly incongruous Streisand was in the rock world of the story.  As a Broadway and screen musical star and pop performer, perhaps she was miscast but what makes her intolerable is the overbearing quality that also disfigured Funny Lady the previous year:  she was hardly miscast in that, having given a great performance as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968).

    Barbra Streisand combines exceptional performing skills and enormous self-confidence.  Everything she does in Funny Lady and A Star Is Born is filtered through her superstar persona – and her awareness of it.  Perhaps this affected Streisand only in musical roles of the period:  I didn’t dislike her in The Way We Were (1973) when I last saw it a few years ago (she sang the theme song over the titles but not on screen).  But in Funny Lady and A Star Is Born her mixture of self-assertion and self-approval doesn’t merely detract from her singing:  it charges her every expression of emotion and delivery of lines (including the casual, goofy ones).  It suffocates characterisation.   What kind of a singer Esther Hoffman, the heroine of A Star is Born, is meant to be is virtually irrelevant:  she is, to all intents and purposes, Barbra Streisand.  Streisand is the polar opposite of Judy Garland in the Cukor film.   Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester was authoritative on stage and screen and, in her personal life, an utterly dependable wife; yet, with Garland playing her, she always seemed on the verge of breakdown.  However tough the going gets for Esther Hoffman, Streisand makes her invulnerable.

    A Star Is Born opens in a huge stadium where John Norman Howard is performing – barking out numbers in a manner that betrays his contempt for his zillions of fans.  It’s immediately clear that this is a screwed-up superstar.  After various brawls and a set-to with his road manager (Gary Busey), he gets into a car leaving the stadium, the driver asks, ‘Where to?’, and John Norman replies, ‘Back ten years’.  I wasn’t sure from what follows whether the car’s destination is the bar where John Norman discovers Esther, singing in an all-girl trio; or whether the words ‘back ten years’ bring on an extended flashback that describes this first meeting and the development of their relationship.  In any case, the camera discovers Esther before John Norman does, and her amazing voice commands attention before he has had chance to hear it.  From pretty well the start of the scene in the bar, the focus is on Esther and the two black girls flanking her – the trio’s name is The Oreos – are effectively her backing singers.  The idea of Esther emerging from obscurity makes no sense:  she’s in the spotlight from the word go.  The film is less a case of a star being born than a demonstration that celebrity is preordained.

    It fits with the Streisand effect that the line between the on-screen audiences’ response to the characters of John Howard and Esther, as distinct from the actors incarnating them, is blurry.  This is quite interesting in the opening section.  The stadium crowd switches instantly from why-are-we-waiting impatience, when John Howard still hasn’t appeared, to deafening adoration the second he comes on stage, though he’s obviously drunk.  Even if this crowd is just doing what Frank Pierson (or Streisand) told them to do, their abrupt change of mood does convey a plausible sense of fickleness; John Howard’s zonked disrespect for them is increased by his realising that the fans either can’t see or don’t care how he’s treating them.   There’s no such ambiguity in the interaction between audiences and Esther.  At a Native-American-rights fund-raiser, John Howard disappoints punters by pushing Esther on stage to perform in his place.  This turns into a rags-to-riches-story trope:  her irresistible singing melts the audience’s hostility and wins them over.  Yet Streisand hardly bothers to suggest that Esther is apprehensive before she works her magic – and the audience’s grinning acclaim seems to confirm we’re watching a Barbra Streisand concert.  This approach proved to be commercially shrewd:  in spite of its bad press, A Star Is Born became the second highest-grossing American movie of 1976.  (The film’s softest-of-soft-porn icing – epitomised by its ‘sexy’ theatrical release poster – probably didn’t harm either.)  But the heroine’s moment of triumph at the benefit is also the moment of Esther Hoffman’s complete submersion by Barbra Streisand.  And the moment at which the film and I parted company again.

    25 January 2018

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